@Mer__edith upfront: i do highly value your work, both personally and that of the whole signal team. you are doing a great service to society!
also, i have not run signal's infrastructure, but i have run ISPs until 2008 and am still helping various clients deliver their serices. i will
not mention any names, but you know many of them. i might know a little bit about scalable software… 🧵
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@Mer__edith It'd be really nice if I could run my own private signal server (or one server in a private cluster) so that an important part of my social network didn't *have* to depend on AWS.
@Mer__edith @Binder As I read through the thread my first thought was to convert these infrastructure systems into government-managed utilities. Of course, that would deter innovation and efficiency. Which leads me to development of utility regulations required for infrastructure systems allowing competition and profits, perhaps with some government investment equally spread across the competitive systems.
@Mer__edith Very insightful thread. Thank you for clearing this out. Unfortunately AWS is almost a necessity these days for scaling application
@Mer__edith Yeah and this is why when there's something with a use case similar to what #Signal is intended for, I always ask if it's #P2P.
@Mer__edith Thanks for the honest and thorough explanations! 🙏
While reading it, I was already afraid of the responses you would receive and they were partly confirmed.
Keep up the great work 👍
@Mer__edith how’s people comparing Signal to Mastodon? Or their own self-hosted service, software or whatever? How people cannot understand the privilege they have to know how and being able to run a self-hosted service?
@Mer__edith Thank you for the explanation. I support Signal.
This situation shows that more people should support EU companies whenever possible, rather than large corporations. We need alternatives for various services and must take small steps in this direction https://european-alternatives.eu/
@Mer__edith ,Wait, how does Threema work, for example?
@Mer__edith There are other options, others are doing it. Using AWS, GCP and Azure is a *choice*. You *can* technically build without them. It would also probably cost less. This is a political choice you are making.
@FreakyFwoof @Mer__edith I knew there was a reason I didn't ever use signal. lol
@Mer__edith
Thank you for the thread. It’s honest and straightforward, making it a perfect example of “privacy is a luxury” and not aligning with mass processing..
@Mer__edith
It is, to me, even more concerning how no one (none of our elected deciders anyway) seem to realise how powerful the #clubofoligarchs is. None of any nations matter at all when said club decides to (seriously) *use* that power.
Seem to be a different topic? Imho nope.
This AWS incident🤨 shows what *could* happen, giving just a glimpse of it.
looking at your replies to replies here that seem to make sense to me (especially re decentralization), you're telling them they don't know what they are talking about. well I definitely don't.
like with debates re #ATproto and #ActivityPub, I have thoughts but I know that we really need to see the experts debate each other somehow. I don't think it happens enough. so I'd say the same re #signal and #matrix etc.
@Mer__edith Thank you for layout this out and continuing to school us. What do you think is the major first solution to end this concentration in computing power - anti-monopoly reforms?
@Mer__edith interesting engagement levels across different sites.
3 media
@Mer__edith one question I had as an SRE, do you use the same kinds of services across all the three big cloud providers in a multi-cloud configuration, or do you use unique/distinct functionality from each?
@Mer__edith not so surprising, as it's very difficult to do anything at any scale online and avoid AWS entirely.
The surprise shouldn't be about Signal, it should be a rallying cry to build diverse infrastructure.
Concerning, bc it indicates that the extent of the concentration of power in the hands of a few hyperscalers is way less widely understood than I’d assumed. Which bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration & solving the real problem. 2/
The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
@Mer__edith What if, instead of running a global comms platform for millions of people that requires AWS level infrastructure, we run a bunch of small, local ones that all federate and interop with each other? 😍
@daniel @Mer__edith Even _IF_ it were possible to create a black box version of "distributed Signal mesh node in a box" that you could run in your basement to help make Signal more tolerant - I mean with enough $ and willpower Im sure it could be done - there's still the question of: if you don't control physical access to the node, there's still potential for attack regardless of how much encryption and protection. Would you ever be able to trust it completely?
The key word is "infrastructure". Infrastructure and (so called) free market don't go together well.
Running a low-latency platform for instant comms capable of carrying millions of concurrent audio/video calls requires a pre-built, planet-spanning network of compute, storage and edge presence that requires constant maintenance, significant electricity and persistent attention and monitoring. 4/
@Mer__edith I don't understand the problem. You have commerce of the scale of the Romans because only the Romans have the brains, resources and reach to build the surprise surprise"Roman roads level commerce"
Oh shit, how do we do Roman roads level commerce without the roads? You don't, you stay in Feudal middleage localized commerce.
Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) don’t. 5/
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
@Mer__edith But you don't have to rent a server or such, if you manage to let the peers communicate directly with each others. There is still an extremely expensive and large amount of hardware behind it, it's called “the Internet”. But it's not owned by one rich Bezos guy.
Decentralized is clearly more difficult. But it means you don't depend on any special large service which can be forced by legal means to conform to whatever surveillance laws there are.
@Mer__edith amen, this is what I keep telling my clients as well: AWS gives you a standardized product that works reliably well at a small scale and at an insane scale.
I always give them the option to hire teams of ops people to maintain servers and infrastructure 24/7 too. But then the high capex is also quite off-putting.
Eventually for small companies (I usually deal with ~50 FTE companies providing a SaaS product), it just makes more sense to use AWS and focus on their core product instead.
