Become a Signal Sustainer

https://signal.org/blog/become-a-signal-sustainer/

by feross • 5 years ago

69 57 5 years ago

drcongo3• 5 years ago

I've pretty much stopped using Signal since they said they're not going to port it to M1. Probably would have done this otherwise.

mdaniel2• 5 years ago

While that certainly squares with my mental model, do you happen to have a link to that decision?

drcongo3• 5 years ago

Sorry, yes. There's multiple sources, but a lot of it collected here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4461

They keep shutting down tickets about it, refuse to review a PR that implemented it for them, and won't even tick the box on the Signal iPad app that would make it available on M1 Macs (where side-loaders have already confirmed for them that it works perfectly.

90% of my Signal usage was on desktop, so this has left such a bad taste that I'd rather use almost anything else now.

vinay4272• 5 years ago

Not the person you replied to, but a GitHub issue thread [1] seems quite close.

I find it somewhat confusing and potentially troubling that (from a few minutes of searching so correct me if I’m wrong) a full-featured ARM-native fork seems to have been created in the community, but the team apparently doesn’t want to go the extra mile of designing the build/CI system to incorporate this as an official release.

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5612

vageli• 5 years ago

Signal runs without issue on my M1 Macbook Air.

ArchOversight• 5 years ago

It runs under Rosetta 2. Not natively.

vinay4272• 5 years ago

I assume they mean native ARM support rather than depending on Rosetta 2, which from what I can tell [1] is still the case.

[1] https://doesitarm.com/app/signal/

tapoxi2• 5 years ago

I really don't get their hostility to low hanging fruit. They continue to only publish a Debian package, if you're on any other distribution you need to use a community built Flatpak. They could improve the security of everyone by just building the same Flatpak themselves!

headhasthoughts• 5 years ago

The Signal xbps package works fine, and Flatpaks are security hell.

kayson• 5 years ago

I donated to Signal Foundation a while back and tried to get my employer donation match but no one from Signal ever responded to their information requests. Oh well... their loss

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA• 5 years ago

The Signal Technology Foundation is in Benevity. My employer matches 100%.

samspenc• 5 years ago

Yeah but I think what OP means is that the beneficiary non-profit needs to confirm the donation to receive the company match. Benevity and other services that companies outsource their giving and matches to are required to do due diligence to confirm the original donation before they can send the company match.

tapoxi2• 5 years ago

Maybe I'd care if they didn't spend a year of donation-funded development time on Mobilecoin integration.

pindogu• 5 years ago

I agree, its really frustrating since that time and effort could've gone into messaging/communication features

carlosdp• 5 years ago

Funny, I was just thinking I'd much rather they launched something like Mobilecoin instead of depending on donations.

luxpir• 5 years ago

I thought similar, but a proper DAO. Security might be an issue but it would be ideal for this project.

finite_jest• 5 years ago

I don't think we should puritans in this case. Signal is an important force against pushes for building the panopticon.

CameronNemo• 5 years ago

Isn't this an alternative to that funding strategy?

gaius_baltar2• 5 years ago

Maybe I'd care if they didn't spend a year of donation-funded development time on Mobilecoin integration.

Well, the donation system itself does not allow mobilecoin as a payment method even when the option to enable it is available. Perhaps they are dropping this cursed thing for good.

jarbus• 5 years ago

LOVE how they don't autorenew subscriptions. Despite the MOB fiasco, I think the people behind this still have good intentions.

daviross• 5 years ago

Don't they have a cryptocurrency to fund them instead, now? I mean, I get it, asking for money means more funding than not asking for money, but it combines in poor taste, in my opinion.

I suppose at least they haven't gone in on NFTs, so there's still hope.

somenewaccount1• 5 years ago

will the books be open sourced? e.g. how much was donated vs how much it costs to run signal? Whom gets any excess? If it's truly non-profit, why not form a 503c that I can get a tax deduction for? That last part is what is required for larger donors to come on board.

JackGreyhat• 5 years ago

Check signal's homepage. At the bottom, it says "Signal, a 501c3 nonprofit". Is that what you mean?

bilal4hmed3• 5 years ago

They are a non profit, they just havent released their numbers in a few years https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

AnonHP2• 5 years ago

Leave it to Signal to keep things hidden for long periods of time (like the server code while it was building some cryptocurrency). Seriously, Signal is not an open or transparent organization by any measure. Ironically, it’s an authoritarian and user hostile platform when examined at a deeper level. Instead of allowing other clients or allowing chat backups (still not possible on iOS) or not exposing your phone number by default to everyone else, it hammers on both trivial and very hard matters that aren’t what a typical user wants right now.

Shadonototra2• 5 years ago

how they managed to pay their employees in the bay area up until then?

donations? i don't buy it

where can i find how they manage their finance?

bilal4hmed3• 5 years ago

here is the last time they published their numbers

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

Shadonototra2• 5 years ago

2018 - 609k of revenue (100% from investment)?

2019 - 19M of revenue

2018 - 450k to AWS (indicates they have an infrastructure and users)

2019 - 887k to AWS

so their invoice for AWS only just doubled and yet their revenue increased by 3019.87%

very fishy activity

i'd love to be able to see their cryto wallets, i suspect some money laundering activity

gaius_baltar2• 5 years ago

That explains the badge thing! Time to donate. Signal is not perfect and has a few things that make me really mad, but it is the best grandma-compatible IM we have.

I also hope they start listening to their users or integrating some PRs already contributed on GitHub.

spurgu3• 5 years ago

Grandma-compatible secure IM.

I don't want my private conversations leaking some time in the future and I trust Signal way more than I trust Whatsapp in this regard.

p2t2p• 5 years ago

I don’t use it very often (not enough people from my circle there) but I went straignt to that screen and donated. We gotta keep this option live and open for us.

anotherhue• 5 years ago

This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to put our money where our mouths are.

seba_dos12• 5 years ago

Signal did made some significant progress across IM space due to Axolotl/Signal Protocol which has to be noted, but I'm not going to use or support a yet another closed silo when there are open and federated networks around that work well.

GekkePrutser5• 5 years ago

Yes or if they'd open up the network to third party clients. Then I'd support them.

I prefer matrix but it doesn't feel as ready for prime time. I doubt the masses will ever adopt it. Whereas signal is really just like WhatsApp.

But I want to use whatever client I want. Sometimes I'm in a shell session on FreeBSD, sometimes on a computer. One of many. Rarely on my phone. Signal is too mobile-first for me. Third party clients could fill that gap.

What I'd love to see is for them to operate it as an open network, not a closed network with an open source app. I wouldn't mind at all if it cost money. I rather pay cash than with my data.

seba_dos12• 5 years ago

Right, that's problematic as well - Signal doesn't even have an official client for my smartphone.

spurgu3• 5 years ago

Moxie makes some good arguments for having the server centralized, which is evidenced in Matrix moving/developing insanely slow due to it's decentralized nature.

crtasm• 5 years ago

Possibly of interest: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

crossroadsguy• 5 years ago

What pushed me away from Signal, after advocating for it for years (in fact deleting WhatsApp for more than a year; WhatsApp IS messaging in my country. Period), trying to get friends and family on it, is that Signal really doesn’t care. It doesn’t care how people will easily use it, like it. When there were issues like endless notification hell for cross platform connections they were busy doing crypto. They talked about ID and it’s nowhere to be seen. Messages delays, non-delivery were widespread issues and there were not even a comment by Signal staff, not a KB article.

Also the amount of hostility and derision they show to their own users and possible contributors at places like Github is what finally did it for me.

At this point I have no patience left for Signal and after years my friends and contacts were pleasantly surprised to find me back on WhatsApp as the primary messaging app. Many of them had signal just to communicate with me that they uninstalled.

Most of them really tried using it (trying to convince their own circle) and found it essentially unusable compared to WhatsApp and Telegram.

late2part• 5 years ago

So different from my experience. Reliability same/better with signal compared to most any other messaging systems save apple messages.

Less technical friends and family say it looks like text messenger/apple messenger.

Haven't seen the hostility. Any examples?

AnonHP2• 5 years ago

The last thing I want is another centralized and monolithic platform that requires a phone number, exposes phone numbers to everyone, and takes weird decisions on non-disclosure (be it source code of parts of the platform or the financial information as a non-profit) to be the one everyone promotes and uses. Based on the priorities Signal follows, which do not match mine,I don’t see value in this. The protocol may be good, but the platform is not.

ev1• 5 years ago

They really, really have to get rid of phone numbers. It's miserable and unsafe.

sliken• 5 years ago

What's less miserable and safer?

What prevents not just message privacy but good metadata resistance? What prevents mapping out your social network? What prevents an attacker from create 100M accounts and flooding all current users with invites and/or messages?

I get that tying signal to a sim is less than perfect, but what is better?

Become a Signal Sustainer

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