On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
  • kpw
    1•1 year ago

    This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.

    • ExpensiveConstant
      2•1 year ago

      Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects

      • kpw
        0•1 year ago

        All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.

          • kpw
            0•1 year ago

            Now everyone is using WhatsApp again and all energy that went towards convincing everyone to use Signal is lost. A better use of that energy would have been be to promote provider independent internet standards.

          • kpw
            1•1 year ago

            Using the current server distribution of my contacts, I would never loose more than 13% of my contacts if a single server shuts down. Federated systems are much more resilient against providers shutting down as well as takeovers. Think Reddit vs Lemmy, Twitter vs Mastodon, Signal vs XMPP.