@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
https://keet.io/
https://docs.pears.com/
uses only edge devices as infra , does voice / video / txt / application distribution via hash urls, solved multi device identity in a p2p space , has search , no limits on file sharing , scales like bitorrent can do ip obfuscation via blind peers, has a whole ass software ecosystem that grows by the day.
it has bugs but it is amazing how well it works and i would say it's ready for scale up.
@Mer__edith it's a good app to use but uploading and sharing a video is a problem because the quality of the video is low.
@Mer__edith It is not about accessing someone's data but about relaying on such infrastructure. Those are two different things. We have already great example how can it be and what happens if you aren't fully independent from such services. This should be a very good lesson for the future, for you, your company and all the Sigjal users as well. It is right about time to start going decentralized way, don't you think?
@Mer__edith stop using excuses. You are paying American companies that do not respect privacy. There are several European alternatives that you can choose from, especially Germans.
@Mer__edith
There are two sides of the same medal.
We cybersecueity specialists always rank hosted services on AWS on a higher rank than a self hosted or elsewhere hosted one. Always, no matter how safe it is.
The second thing is, no matter the risk of hosting on AWS, it is a correctly cooperation and support of Amazon, Amazon infrastructure, Amazon services and services companies.
This support is by promoting the service activity or passively, directly payment for a company which is officially support a president, his ICEs, his MAGAs and politics.
Our problem has NOTHING to do with the quality, security, E2EE of the Apps Services, Servers and Owner. Our problem can not be fixed by a simple update, but by MIGRATION.
And migrations is a main topic in the US.
@Mer__edith Thank you for taking the time to explain all this!
In a completely different direction -- are you actually on a server that limits you to 500 character posts? I mean, I am, but I'm not a communications expert.
@Mer__edith think the surprise is that many, perhaps naively, consider Signal to be part of the resistance against big tech oligarchy and have little understanding of how insidious Amazon is. It’s not like one can just boycott them out of existance by cancelling prime and not shopping on Amazon.
They are a perputual money machine.
@Mer__edith We may have to go back to paper and pencil!
My 2 cents:
Being on the Fediverse and also running an XMPP server, why do we use centralized systems?
Corporate takeover and control.
@Mer__edith Serious question: The concentration of providers for real-time, global networks, can it really be avoided? If we had ten of them instead of the , I don't know, the three? we have, they'd all have to have more or less the same kit, duplicating investments for a smaller share of the market. That would make it more expensive. Would that even work?
You can probably tell I'm not in this kind of business, but I'm a citizen of a European country, and de-coupling from US is dabated.
@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… 🧵
@Mer__edith that said, i think there is a real problem with the narrative of your thread, that the problem at hand was so big that it needed the help of a hyperscaler, that not even signal could run their own infra on bare metal.
in my world, clients who have infra in perfectly good shape, scaling out, performant, whatever, voluntarily give up this privilege and submit themselves to #capswag on the basis of anecdotal evidence like this… 🧵
@Mer__edith if you have, and i assume you do have, fully automated your ops, you need apis like k8s or s3, sure. but that is not the same as buying from a hyperscaler. you could run the platform yourselves, and maybe still use public cloud services for "spill over".
i apologise for the unsolicited advice, but i can not imagine that signal was not big enough an organisation to be able to run their own infra.
please do seriously consider this option. if not you, who should?
@Mer__edith for me, the AWS outage drew attention to Signal's centralized nature - that it runs on servers controlled by Signal and hosted in the US. Moving away from AWS would not address this problem. I have chosen to use decentralized messaging apps instead. They are just as secure, more resilient, and not dependent on Big Tech cloud infrastructure.
