PieFed chez MarudRecent commits suggest Signal is preparing a paid subscription for backups.
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github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/7ee1b1…
As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.
Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can't run entirely on donations.
Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it's probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Wikipedia has way more donors, since it's basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn't the default choice.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
At least this time they do it out in the open, not like with the MobileCoin integration.
As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.
Its happened too much, I've asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades
It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.
I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn't use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it
If this feature rolls out but you can't pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal).
If you can support the project than do it. But if you can't than don't force your self
Switching to Molly won't necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.
I was saying local backup
Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they'll remove it when they add this.
Maybe lets see what happens
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
Interesting, how do you use syncthing with molly?
Well, if you didn't know, Molly is a soft fork of the Signal Android client.
But, I think both support making local backups of your chats.
I do so daily and keep two copies. These get synced in real time to my little NAS and/or my PC/Laptop
Thanks, I do use Molly but never occured to me to use Syncthing to make a local backup copy. Great idea.
Glad to be of help! I personally really like Syncthing, since it makes implementing a resilient decentralised quite easy.
Though I would recommend you go with "Syncthing-Fork", as iirc the "vanilla" app was put into maintenance mode or smth like that
Excellent news honestly. Trying to get people to switch to something encrypted and the one thing I've thought of is that I want to know it can continue indefinitely. Everything else in life costs money- we just never think of it computer wise because we pay with our data and privacy.
This can join threema with a solid revenue stream. I back mine up locally but would pay for this anyhow.
That's a pretty good idea for monetization.
Completely fine with that, I agree
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn't just buying a phone with more space. I'd like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that's gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I'd prolly just redirect my donations to that.
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
honestly thats why I don't like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there's also the security about metadata, but for most people that's probably not a huge concern
Would pay for
I commented this in the other thread, sharing it here as well
I don't mind paying a fair price, for a service, so they should go for it. I use both Signal and Telegram, and I would pay for Telegram too, if the price was more fair...
Doing use Telegram, let alone pay for it. So many red flags with Telegram.
Price is fair but features aren’t worth it.
Finally a good approach at raising money (other than donations)
Good initiative. They need money to work
Like cloud backup on their server or a subscription just to export the files to store offline?
I think it's cloud backups.
In the GitHub commit it's called Renew your Signal Backups subscription.
If it's 1 euro a month, I'll do it
All of my signal conversations have auto expiry
Do people really use their conversation logs for things? Are you often searching your conversational logs?
Outside of corporate compliance issues I can't imagine the workflow for most people
History search is great when you have a lot of friends and poor memory. Perhaps not your use case ?
Yes, and yes.
"I said this was happening 3 weeks ago. Here's the literal text of me sending it to you and you saying 'Okay thanks' in reply."
Shuts down an argument real quick.
Me and my wife and wife sends information, pictures , whatever. I often search my messages for stuff
Yes and yes
I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it's because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it's just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn't there, people might remember something important differently.
Though the same I like my conversations disappear when I need to reinstall Signal.
Most Whatsapp users (my parents) want to keep logs of everything, its become normalised.
out of curiosity: what duration do you have?
My default is set to 1 week.
Enough for conversational context
Yes, and yes. But most of it's because I've moved all communication over to it.
If I have anything that shouldn't stick around it doesn't stick around, If I need my grocery list from last month it's there though.
That said, I really don't have any interest in backups. It's an ephemeral stream at best that is there when I need it. And there are parts of it disappear when they're no longer needed.
The days where we presumed we could safely bitch about things to our friends over social media are clearly gone and privacy is of ultimate importance.
Pretend it's 1984, and you won't get yourself in trouble.
You are right, I don't really search my messages that much. Most important conversion is going by email for most people still.
I have never searched for a message ever.
Anyone knows about creating easily a signal account without smartphone ? Telegram does that and I have tremondous people that would use that instead of whatsapp/telegram and that don't understand matrix or even Mattermost 😭
Telegram does that? how? you need a phone number, so essentially a smartphone too. or is it common in your community to use feature phones, so that the problem is no registration on PC?
No Telegram can do registration with just a simple text message + pc, no need of smartphones just simple dumb phone
Assuming you have a computer to get on here, you could use an Android emulator like BlueStacks.
But you need a simcard with this emulator to connect to signal, here I'm talking about getting a text message and then still have a signal account, or even better : only having an account but wirh email or norhing. I think it's not possible to have signal work the way you describe.
A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn't have to be associated with the device that's running Signal last I checked.
Telegram too requires that you verify your phone number, right? So I took that as a given.
As long as local backups don't go away this looks fine.
Cloud backups, for security!
Imagine having to pay with it with MobileCoin's shitcoin ^^