In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/
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Meaning that infrastructure like AWS is not something that Signal, or almost anyone else, could afford to just “spin up.” Which is why nearly everyone that manages a real-time service–from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodon–rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies. 8/
@Mer__edith aren’t most mastodon instances hosted in Europe, mostly on Hetzner? I know it’s not as sensitive to latency as a real time communication tool such as signal, but there it is.
@Mer__edith AFAIK, the mastodon running in my basement has no reliance on AWS whatsoever. The dev might be though, no idea. But the OP, no.
@Mer__edith I'm curious, which parts of the decentralized systems such as Mastodon do have to run on big tech infrastructure? If there is one wouldn't there be a way to make them independent ?
I'm only aware of the lack of local hosters and infrastructure in some parts of the world. I tried to setup a self-hosted server in Western-Africa...
Mastodon? The comparison is flawed.
You can run Mastodon without AWS, etc. just fine.
You even can run an instance in your basement if you want.
@Mer__edith I don't understand one thing. You mention Mastodon and to me that seems a bit inaccurate? I'm not disagreeing with you in how the prevalence of big scale cloud providers is bad, and how Signal as a centralised platform basically doesn't have other options. But I'm just wondering, isn't decentralisation one way to solve this?
The whole thread is about how AWS and other big scale providers created the international infrastructure that is needed for Signal to run smoothly and that infrastructure would be impossible for Signal to set up independently. But Mastodon (and Matrix) is decentralised, so yes, if there was one big Mastodon server it would need these resources, but isn't it one perk of decentralisation that because there are so many independent people doing it, creating that international infrastructure becomes possible?
I've been using Signal for almost 10 years and Mastodon/fediverse for around 3 including hosting my own instances (both self-hosting and using small-medium scale server providers) and they have been very comparable in speed and reliability.
The whole thread is about how AWS and other big scale providers created the international infrastructure that is needed for Signal to run smoothly and that infrastructure would be impossible for Signal to set up independently. But Mastodon (and Matrix) is decentralised, so yes, if there was one big Mastodon server it would need these resources, but isn't it one perk of decentralisation that because there are so many independent people doing it, creating that international infrastructure becomes possible?
I've been using Signal for almost 10 years and Mastodon/fediverse for around 3 including hosting my own instances (both self-hosting and using small-medium scale server providers) and they have been very comparable in speed and reliability.
nearly everyone that manages a real-time service–from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodon–rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies
Mastodon doesn't, though?
There certainly will be servers hosted on AWS but when AWS went down, most Mastodon instances stayed up, and people were cracking jokes at more centralized platforms.
@Mer__edith It's possible to manage a real-time service without these companies, but it's challenging. I understand that it would hard for Signal to build and maintain its own infrastructure, but the questions is, if Signal team is considering what to do in the future to make impact of future outages (which may occur again) to have lesser impact on people who use it.
@Mer__edith Agree - if you want to run your service centralized. Neither my Mastodon nor my Matrix-server need anything but my own self-hosting. Of course they won't handle billions of concurrent customers - but a few tens of thousands similar to mine will. Together.
I simply don't think Signal being centralized is a good thing. It's your choice, but alternatives do exist and those do not need hyperscalers.
@troed I don't think you have a clear understanding of this space, but I hope you have a good time digging in and learning more.
@djoerd
This discussion is soon to be 10 years old: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
@Mer__edith
@Mer__edith @troed This is a really shitty reply, especially when multiple experienced people are expressing the same opinion.
@Mer__edith Thanks for your condescending reply. I used to manage global SaaS within fintech with nodes in GCP, AWS and Azure and on multiple different continents.
But even if Signal had the billions needed to recreate AWS, it’s not just about money. The talent to run these systems is rare & concentrated. The expertise, the tooling, the playbooks, the very language of modern SRE came out of these hyperscalers, and is now synonymous with 'the cloud.' 9/
But even if Signal had the billions needed to recreate AWS, it’s not just about money. The talent to run these systems is rare & concentrated. The expertise, the tooling, the playbooks, the very language of modern SRE came out of these hyperscalers, and is now synonymous with 'the cloud.' 9/
@Mer__edith I just hope they don't get rid of those people who are able to build and maintain the stuff to run the whole system by some 'ai'...
o, yes, Signal runs on AWS. It also runs on your phone, which runs on iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). And on Dekstop, via Windows (Microsoft). Each of these presents similar dependencies on large entrenched tech companies, and concomitant barriers and risks. 10/
That's not a good comparison.
We can choose to run Signal on free software.
Signal offers to run on fascist software, and as you say it's a good trade-off; but it doesn't impose the use of such software.
That's one of the reasons, I can't use Signal: It requires Android/iOS, which I don't use. Even the "desktop" client (Linux!) requires an Android/iOS device, right?
(The other reaons are phone number requirement and server not hosted in my jurisdiction, the #EU. #DigitalSovereignty is relevant to me.)
@Mer__edith I'm not an expert but always a bit sceptic of such "Use GAFAM or go to the woods live in your cave" approach. Both my laptop (Linux, not Microsoft) and my phone (Again Linux not Google nor Apple) let me chat/video call via @delta (not GAFAM afaik) or @Matrix (also not GAFAM afaik). Maybe they use AWS too (yet worked through the outage), maybe they don't "do it at scale" ... as far as they work for me I'm happy to use/support them. And if they don't for some reason I'd stick to email.
@Mer__edith and on #postmarketOS Linux smartphones ☺️
@Mer__edith Signal on desktop also runs on Linux, which sounds quite right from the first look, BUT Signal on desktop is just a remote control of the phone-installed Signal app!
So you are still bound to Apple and Google.
That's another bad decision. It relates to the bad decision of using the phone number as ID.
@Mer__edith Thanks for the threat
@Mer__edith my phone runs without Google, but you force me to download signal via Google by not permitting @fdroidorg to serve your APKs.
In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/
@Mer__edith Surprised you had to even explain any of this until I saw the replies suggesting Tor and "why don't you run your own infra?" 🙄😮💨
I've been using #Signal from the very beginning (TextSecure times), and I've been advocating Signal a lot.
But the centralized architecture, instead of a federated decentralized approach is something I never liked. Also the focus on BigTech platforms (IOS, Android) is something I do not like. I'm using a #Librem5 #Linux phone, but there is no official primary client for Linux.
Still, I'm donating, but I would appreciate addressing centralism and #BigTech dependency.
I don’t believe federation is possible without leaking a huge amount of metadata, but I believe decentralisation is. It would be great to see Signal actively investigating the options in the design space that enable it.
The client side is a bigger problem. The choice of license has two major impacts:
- Only Signal (who have a CLA and so are not bound by the license) can publish anything on the Apple App stores. This means that a legal injunction against Signal shipping the app in a country will cut off around half of the users in that country.
- No one can integrate Signal with their back end systems. A load of people install WhatsApp or WeChat because some institution uses them to communicate with customers and then uses them to talk to friends because they’re already installed. I’d love for my bank to be able to communicate with me via Signal instead of POTS, for example, and then for Signal to benefit from the network effects: if the bank says ‘install Signal to communicate with us securely’ then that’s a few million folks who will have Signal installed already.
It is very rare for a protocol to become ubiquitous without a permissively licensed reference implementation.
That's not entirely true.
First and foremost, Signal chose to be a centralised walled garden globally operated by one monolithic company. It then required a hyperscaler as a consequence of this design decision.
i'm more concerned that signal do best practices in terms of redundancy/failover and data encryption for cloud. it's quite possible to do cloud (or multi-cloud) robustly but it takes extra effort/engineering/expense over more minimal uses of a cloud service.
can you give any details of your multi regional, multi-cloud use, active/fast failover, etc.?
The problem is that signal is not running as a federated service. This makes you dependend on services like AWS and the like.
And there's another AWS/(any evil hosting service): As I understood #signal hashes phone numbers before uploading them to let accounts discover each other. The number space of phone numbers is not really big and having computing power and storage space at hand it shouldn't be too complicated to make a database to quickly access any phone number by its hash.
This information - using default signal settings - is exposed to super computing companies. This information allows to recreate the topology of the social network that is made of the millions of signal accounts.
@Mer__edith it’s even worse than that. 20 years ago most of the network pipes were owned and managed by telcos, nowadays it is the hyperscalers who commission international fiber cables and the bulk of Internet traffic goes over their backbones:
https://hknog.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01_GeoffHuston_TheDeath_of_Transit_and_Beyond.pdf
@Mer__edith Not only is there not "another choice", but the economics you so well describe *require* an oligopoly -- there's no other way to get the required concentration of capital.
(Well, a regulated monopoly might work. But it's unclear how to do regulate a truly global monopoly. And I'm not sure I'd want the cloud equivalent of PG&E running my servers.)
@Mer__edith exactly! Signal didn't have many, if any options.
It's a screaming canary in the tech-infra-coal-mine.
We have to build alternatives! Or we're all silenced, on a whim or a failure.
@Mer__edith I get your points and can see your reasoning. The counter argument I would make (as I do for other tech, too, not just Signal) is that unless we actually spend our money with (currently) smaller providers in the space, they will never stand a chance to expand and offer viable alternatives. Al least some part of our business decisions should pave the way towards a more resilient future. But that's just my opinion fwiw.
So, Signal does what we can to provide a service w integrity in the concentrated ecosystem we're working in. We protect your comms w end-to-end encryption, so that we can use AWS and others as a highway across which to send Signal data in ways that don’t let AWS, or anyone else, gain access. 12/
To conclude: my silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear. And that this can help us craft ways of undoing this concentration and creating real choice ❤️ 13/
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So, Signal does what we can to provide a service w integrity in the concentrated ecosystem we're working in. We protect your comms w end-to-end encryption, so that we can use AWS and others as a highway across which to send Signal data in ways that don’t let AWS, or anyone else, gain access. 12/
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