33 ms·

Signal is having technical difficulties

907 points by tonymet 6y ago

bjt2n3904 6y ago
The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. As much as I love Signal, we've got to move to things that are decentralized. I setup a prosody[1] server a while back, but have nobody to talk with. If anyone wants to try their system out, I'm bjt@2n3904.net on XMPP. 1 - https://prosody.im/ https://prosody.im/
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  I can't figure out how to use it. xD
  - bjt2n3904 6y ago
    It's not the easiest thing to setup. There's a few places I'm sure which let you get free XMPP accounts, and a handful of good clients. I'm using Conversations for Android. If you have a server that will allow self service registration, you can make an account right from the app.
- Zash 6y ago
  Hi, Prosody dev here. It looks like your server isn't reachable. If you'd like help with that you can join the community support channel: https://prosody.im/discuss/ https://prosody.im/discuss/
  - bjt2n3904 6y ago
    Aww beans. I looked at the IM observatory, and it seemed to check out fine...
    - Zash 6y ago
      Tried the server-to-server test?
      - bjt2n3904 6y ago
        Ahh cripes, I had port 5269 blocked. Whoop! Running the test now, thanks for the help! Edit: Aaand I'm up! Got my first message. Thank you for your help, and for your work on Prosody!
        zamadatix 6y ago
        And herein lies the reason decentralized isnt about uptime, when the server you use is down its down regardless how many use it and it doesn't matter to you others still work. It'll probably get more downtime over the years than the mega important one as well. That's not to say decentralized doesn't have a ton of benefits just uptime for the user isnt one.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    Out of interest, why was the Windows download deprecated? It's a bit much to expect mom & pop to be playing with WSL?
- kortex 6y ago
  I thought signal was highly decentralized? What traffic does the server handle once two clients have "found" each other? Which I believe uses hashes of phone numbers.
  - okso 6y ago
    This article from 2018 illustrates the architecture of Signal: https://sorincocorada.ro/signal-messanger-architecture/ https://sorincocorada.ro/signal-messanger-architecture/
    - Reedx 6y ago
      Based on that, they use Google, Apple, Twilio and AWS in the backend. All who have shown they are willing to deplatform with little notice as the result of kneejerk public pressure. How easily can Signal replace those dependencies if this comes for them? "Extremists move to secret online channels": https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/extremists-move-secret-line-channels-plan-inauguration-day-d-c-n1253876 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/extremists-move-se...
      - okso 6y ago
        As far as I know, Google and Apple are only used to send Push notifications to users. These are optional, and Signal on Android can be used without Google. AWS S3 is/was used to share files with other users. It became a standardized API, with many alternatives supporting the protocol, so switching to a different provider or on-premises should not be difficult. Signal intends to remove the dependency on phone numbers, and therefore Twilio, but this has not be done yet.
      - scambier 6y ago
        All IM apps rely on Google or Apple (on their respective platforms) for the push notifications. The alternative is polling in relatively small intervals, but that wakes up the app, which uses the battery without any real usage. And if the OS decides to kill your app's process, your polling dies with it and you don't get notifications.
    - 6y ago
- zrm 6y ago
  I wonder if Signal would be open to doing that. I know they don't like third party implementations because then if you need to make a protocol change you'd have to wait 30 years for everyone else to update their clients. But if you're already requiring a single client that it makes it easier to do decentralized messaging for exactly the same reason. Another option that works pretty well is to do both. So try decentralized (DHT / direct connection) first and fallback to a central server if that doesn't work. Then you're up as long as either one of them is working. And there is a lot less load on your central servers.
- samstave 6y ago
  Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Do you need a static IP? (Xfinity appears alergic to allowing static IPs any more, and I am too lazy to setup my own router after 26 years setting up other peoples net infra..) Id love to chat with you...
  - bjt2n3904 6y ago
    I'm sure you can... but I think one of the big hiccups is that you need DNS to point to your server if you want it to be externally available. I've used XMPP servers for intra-organization chatservers before though, and it worked great!
  - upofadown 6y ago
    >Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Sure. >Do you need a static IP? Well you need a domain name to identify your server. It's the same thing as with email. So however you can do that... It might be less work to just use a preexisting public server: * https://list.jabber.at/ https://list.jabber.at/
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Easily. > Do you need a static IP? No, but you need access to a domain record to add the required entries for XMPP, and update them if your IP changes. One can do this for free (once you have a domain that points at their DNS records) with a provider like Digitalocean and their API to update the domains. Set up guides: https://prosody.im/doc https://prosody.im/doc Community to ask: https://homebrewserver.club/ https://homebrewserver.club/
- olah_1 6y ago
  Of course there are protocols like XMPP and Matrix. But there are also solutions that don’t require everyone to host their own server. Rather, people just host impersonal nodes on the network and everyone uses the whole network together. Examples would be Status[1] (Ethereum) and Session[2] (Oxen neé Loki). I’m sure there are others that use this architecture too. I just like it because I don’t have to be personally concerned with who is running my “home server”. Because there is no one single home server in this model. [1]: https://status.im/ https://status.im/ [2]: https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    How does that work, though? You need to have some central database of user IDs, or can you just never have a user ID and will you need to add people by full public key. As soon as you try to map big public keys to a phone number, username, or some other short ID, you need some registration system, probably on a FCFS basis. How does that work in this "you can run but not manage your own server" type decentralized system? And who prevents message spam / abuse handling? It sounds like these must be centralized systems presented as decentralization, similar to how Keybase marketed themselves as end to end encrypted and nobody noticed that you can't actually verify peer's keys thus making it TOFU (similar to blindly accepting ssh keys). (And when you asked people about their claims about Keybase, they'd tell you to RTFM regardless of whether you already said you did that... A marketing department can be very powerful even on HN.)
    - olah_1 6y ago
      Status uses public keys, but you can optionally link an Ethereum Domain Name (ENS). So it’s basically like license plates where you can buy a vanity plate if you want. Also, friends can just add their own nickname for you in their contacts. Personally I think that’s the best way to do it. Public keys aren’t very different from phone numbers at this point. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore either. Each person just has their own Rolodex mapping of keys to names.
- oblio 6y ago
  > The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. Is there any decentralized protocol that's in widespread use? Email is the only one, and if hackers take out Gmail and 2-3 other major email providers 99% of the world's personal email is gone.
  - remirk 6y ago
    The web.
    - oblio 6y ago
      Touche.
robotbikes 6y ago
This is the first big outage I've felt affects me personally in any meaningful way as someone who has tried to stay away from overly depending on cloud services and SaaS like Gmail or slack. I first noticed that a couple of hours ago my messages seemed to be hanging and going through without the typical confirmation. The status page has no more information than the title at this point.
tomp 6y ago
At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").
- LordAtlas 6y ago
  I don't see a banner on the top of my app. I only found out when the desktop client kept timing out with 502 errors and after asking on Twitter, found other people were having issues too. It's there on https://status.signal.org/ https://status.signal.org/ though.
  - vecio 6y ago
    There is a banner in the Android app, not on the desktop.
    - Daniel_sk 6y ago
      The desktop app shows a yellow "DISCONNECTED - Check your network connection" warning. They probably should work on better error/status reporting in next version.
      - zamadatix 6y ago
        Desktop app is still behind the mobile in a few things but they are getting closer these days
        spurgu 6y ago
        Yeah I was very positively surprised to find that the desktop app has a large number of useful keyboard shortcuts: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036517511-Signal-Desktop-Keyboard-Shortcuts https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036517511-Si...
tonymet 6y ago
I noticed this in messages taking about 30s to confirm sending. But the service has been reliable and clear feedback when messages are failing
bitcharmer 6y ago
I still get notifications about incoming messages, just can't read them because the app rejects my passphrase. This has been going on for more than an hour now. If they aim at picking up whatsapp refugees, this is pretty bad.
luxuryballs 6y ago
good for them to be open about it because it’s easy for internet weirdness to be suspicious these days, my buddy just about shat a brick when a message with the newly leaked video from Fulton GA suddenly vanished: https://www.bitchute.com/video/lep8A5YTQ0P3/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/lep8A5YTQ0P3/
- dmcbrayer 6y ago
  I'm curious how a link to a Fulton County board of elections surveillance video has anything to do with Signal's availability issues.
  - luxuryballs 6y ago
    Did you read the rest of the comment? Without the link for context and given recent censorship of this kind of stuff I figured it might have seemed a little bit paranoid.
mahdyarhp 6y ago
They are not Telegram. They can't handle millions of users in a short period of time, although it's not on them, it's Telegram's magic.
- fastball 6y ago
  I think it's less magic and more the lack of E2EE.
  - konart 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with encryption and how does either of services work on the backend, but shouldn't E2E happen on users devices? (like... end to end). And if that's the case - how does this impact Signal's infrastructure?
    - fastball 6y ago
      - You need to orchestrate key exchange between clients which is additional overhead (probs negligible). - Messages can't be edited so any corrections made by users need to be entirely new transmission over the wire (probs negligible) - Encrypted data can't be effectively compressed, and compression before encryption can lead to side-channel attacks. You can generally mitigate this by building your compression and encryption together (e.g. SSL does this), but not entirely sure this works for Signal with an E2EE arch. Either way I would assume that E2EE payload sizes transmitted over the wire are larger than stuff sent over the wire with GZIP/SSL (as Telegram is probably doing). - MAIN REASON (my guess): group chats in the Signal protocol require sending a different encrypted message to each participant, rather than a single identical message to all participants. Honestly my algorithmic complexity chops aren't the best, but I think that would make Signal group chats O[2n] while Telegram group chats are more like O[log n], if they utilize clients sending the group chat to each other, which is a crazy level of difference in efficiency for what is effectively the same thing and a pretty common use case (group chats). Long story short, secure things that are hard to mess with are less efficient than things that are easier to mess with. This is why blockchains like Bitcoin are much more lethargic than a normal database – there are some necessary performance trade-offs required when you want high levels of security in your system. There are a bunch of small little things that probably aren't a big deal, but every little bit adds up when you're trying to scale a service to millions of active users / billions of messages.
rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
Nice workaround for Android users: tap and hold the send button to switch to SMS (insecure but still) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Can-I-send-SMS-MMS-with-Signal- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca... You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.
- manesioz 6y ago
  I use the Signal app as my default for everything because of this feature (secure communication with Signal users and insecure SMS with non-Signal users)
- bzb6 6y ago
  What a workaround. SMS are not encrypted, cost money, have a length limit, don’t support images or groups...
  - xeromal 6y ago
    I didn't know some places still charge for SMS
    - sgt 6y ago
      I think they charge for SMS pretty much anywhere outside the US.
      - xeromal 6y ago
        Wow, thanks for the info. That stinks!
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
        No one pays for SMS in France. And probably in most European countries.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
samstave 6y ago
FYI - check the JRE ep with Moxy Marlinspike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0NkT6gbP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0NkT6gbP0 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uVHiMqqJxy8iR2YB63aeP https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uVHiMqqJxy8iR2YB63aeP === (Clearly downvoted by idiots who didnt even watch the short edit about signal... HN has an arrogance problem... Moxy Marlinspike is the founder of signal - and he talks about why he did so... Listen to him...)
- mackrevinack 6y ago
  a lot of people are pissed about the podcast moving to spotify as well
  - samstave 6y ago
    Why? Youtube is trash now... For example, I have never once received a "you should watch this as well" decent recommendation from Youtube, the sidebar is absolute garbage and cant even keep the concept of a topic-thread... Youtube is total trash.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Are you logged in? Because I don't think they tailor their recommendations much to non-logged in users. I get lots of recommendations that end up being good videos.
vecio 6y ago
I'm working on another open source Messenger on Signal protocol. https://mixin.one/messenger https://mixin.one/messenger
- mlindner 6y ago
  Signal is having difficulties because of load. Does your messenger have ways of reducing load?
tonymet 6y ago
Is it possible to switch to backup Signal server within app? i'm researching running my own in emergencies.
- robrtsql 6y ago
  Signal is totally centralized. The server is (if I recall correctly) open source, but if you were to run your own server, all of your contacts would have to be using your server too in order to communicate with them. I assume that the hostname(s) of the central Signal servers are hardcoded in the app somewhere, since they're not meant to be replaced.
  - z77dj3kl 6y ago
    That's right https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/bac01d739403afc9bfc3d4997adc5e4a28612044/SignalServiceKit/src/TSConstants.swift#L157-L167 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/bac01d739403afc...
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    Server is open source but good luck setting it up. There is no documentation for it. Also, they have intentionally excluded the option for clients to connect to alternate servers. This stance really rubs me the wrong way. I love the Signal protocol, everything else is kinda meh.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      > Also, they have intentionally excluded the option for clients to connect to alternate servers. Since Signal doesn't federate, if you switched your client to an alternate server you would be unable to communicate with the 99.9% of people out there using the official Signal server. Signal isn't going to give a UI option that is certain to cause frustration and bafflement for the vast majority of users. Those wanting to use an alternate server are probably a small nerd niche who already know how to fork the client.
- neltnerb 6y ago
tinyhouse 6y ago
Hopefully it'd teach them a lesson to stay humble after their stupid recent tweets laughing at whatsapp indirectly.
arunc 6y ago
Why not do a some kind of lazy P2P instead of proactive P2P? IIRC, Signal calls are P2P.
- barbs 6y ago
  I believe the calls still require the server to bootstrap to connection but I could be wrong.
- RIMR 6y ago
  Wait, so I can geolocate someone and figure out their ISP by starting a Signal call? Great feature, I love it!
  - spiznnx 6y ago
    Yes, if they pick up, but you can disable p2p in the settings.
  - aarchi 6y ago
    Calls can be relayed through Signal servers: > Always relay calls: > Relay all calls through the Signal server to avoid revealing your IP address to your contact. Enabling will reduce call quality.
- sschueller 6y ago
  https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ decentralized, encrypted, p2p, no phone number required. I'm not sure why nobody uses it.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    Because it's incredibly unstable, and horrible to use? Yes, tried it, even earlier, when it was called GNUsomething. EDIT Ring. It was called Ring.
hcurtiss 6y ago
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware. I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there". Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      Young people are (generally) fans of corporate governance and government overreach. It's older "boomer" types who feel threatened by the new religion of sensitivity and cancel culture who worry about corporate governance and government overreach. Please don't be pedantic on my comment and try to understand the general picture I am painting, you'll find the gist of the comment to be true even if I didn't articulate it super well. Thanks.
    - sedev 6y ago
tsjq 6y ago
Is this being caused by the tons of WhatsApp users joining Signal ?
- rantwasp 6y ago
  or parler users, or twitter users, or disgruntled telegram users. could be multiple issues
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    Kind of the perfect storm.
- beervirus 6y ago
  My wife out of the blue just started asking if she should switch from WhatsApp to signal. What’s causing the exodus?
  - momothereal 6y ago
    WhatsApp updated/clarified their Privacy Policy, which states they share PII with Facebook (their parent company).
    - mxxx 6y ago
      Surely it’s not this alone. Most of the people who seem to be switching that I know still use Facebook itself anyway?
      - momothereal 6y ago
        If you want more context/discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 The background here is that WhatsApp previously stated that they would never share user data for profit, i.e., not selling ads [1]. Reading that blog post leaves a sour taste in HN's collective mouth, because not 2 years later they would get acquired by the ad giant Facebook and now mandate that users agree to share their data with FB. The wording made it seem like accounts that didn't agree with the new policies would get terminated on February 8th. A few days later, WhatsApp posted [2] that their update was misinterpreted by users and media, and that the clarifications to their policies were to increase transparency. They also pushed the ultimatum for a few months. [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads [2] https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-update https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-up...
dboreham 6y ago
Demand a refund!
drummer 6y ago
I remember years ago back when I still used WhatsApp when there would also be temporary outages due to huge increase in traffic/popularity. Growing pains. I would have hoped, though, that the engineers at Signal would have foreseen this and would have been prepared.
Datagenerator 6y ago
Quite feasible no competition is allowed and they resorted to DDoS the new neighbor. Support government backdoors or get hammered.
markhalonen 6y ago
After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
- sjaak 6y ago
  Burned by Keybase how? It's still online and functional afaik. Do you mean the cryptocurrency shenanigans, the acquisition, ..?
  - markhalonen 6y ago
    the acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430
- olah_1 6y ago
  How did you get burned by Keybase? An outage or something else? I know in their own terms they basically say “we can delete your account, but we won’t”. I chuckled and never bothered.
  - rvz 6y ago
    "Ultimately, Keybase's 'future' is in Zoom's hands." [0] That is what the parent comment is talking about. [0] https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom
- lucb1e 6y ago
  I'd estimate that Signal is a fair bit better than Keybase since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place. But since you're on Matrix now, of course that's self hosted and as stable as you make it yourself. Decentralization for the win, kudos for going with an even better solution (even if I disagree about Signal not being a stable choice)!
  - 6y ago
shafyy 6y ago
Just a friendly reminder that Signal runs on donations and that if you can go and give them some money: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Or that you can use that money for a Matrix server instead of supporting centralization. Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Which Matrix server?
    - lucb1e 6y ago
      E.g. OVH, Hetzner, TransIP... idk whatever kinda server you like. Or repurpose an old laptop at home, for a few Watts you get something that's usually more powerful per ¤ than a VPSes (or "cloud instances" in newspeak). Then install a Matrix server, add your domain, and you've got your own Signal alternative. Or just use the standard matrix.org home server if you're just trying it out / don't mind a not-super-fast home server. Or one of a dozen public Matrix servers: https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php
      - oblio 6y ago
        IRC all over again. I don't see this taking over until someone comes up with its Gmail.
        ripdog 6y ago
        'its gmail' is matrix.org. It is the default server when you start up Element.
alan5 6y ago
I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  your comment led me to do same!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- olah_1 6y ago
  We have no info as to how much money they need or how much they currently have. For all we know, this was just an area of oversight and not related to funding at all. I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.
  - too_pricey 6y ago
    They're a non-profit, so their financials are publicly disclosed. ProPublica only has it as recently as 2018, but here was the financials then: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/824506840/12_2019_prefixes_82-86%2F824506840_201812_990_2019121216951146 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
    - olah_1 6y ago
      That’s helpful, thanks. So they’re 4mil in the hole? How is it possible that they’re still running?
      - bilal4hmed 6y ago
JuliusMars 6y ago
I don't believe in coincidences
lvs 6y ago
DNS is resolving correctly again to AWS, but the servers are 504 timeout.
- sschueller 6y ago
  So technically if amazon didn't like signal they could kick them off and the whole network goes to shit. Where do people think all these parlor users are going?
earth2mars 6y ago
I am very interested in hearing the postmortem of this extended outage technology/architecture stand point. Not to be cynical, but I wonder if this is caused by an attack by the company who is losing users!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- faitswulff 6y ago
  I doubt we’ll get much info about it out of Signal / OWS. I’ve asked about their tech stack and ability to scale in AMAs before and got fairly vague responses.
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    The server code was published. Even if we don't know what services they use, you should be able to find quite easily what language the stuff is written in.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      Server code may not tell you what the server is deployed on.
      - lucb1e 6y ago
        Hence my writing of > Even if we don't know what services they use and it merely helping to find > what language the [server] stuff is written in
        faitswulff 6y ago
        I don’t understand how that will help you figure out the equivalent of a post mortem for a service outage.
        6y ago
EGreg 6y ago
Guess who is not having technical difficulties, ever: Telegram They are going to be the next Facebook. I don't understand why people underestimate them so much. When they rolled their own crypto in some areas, people made fun of them, yet no one could break it. When they published their source code openly, people say they aren't open source like signal. When FB bought WhatsApp, people seriously continued to choose it over Telegram, despite Telegram able to host much bigger chats, and so on. And being used all over the world, by the same government officials who were officially trying to get it offline LMAO. I just don't get what's so bad about Telegram.
- scubbo 6y ago
  > They are going to be the next Facebook > I just don't get what's so bad about Telegram. Pick one.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Well first off Telegram doesn't actually do end to end encryption unless you manually opt in. They don't allow end to end encrypted voice or video calls. They don't allow end to end encrypted group chats. Telegram is also a for-profit company that has no guarantees that they'll continue to not harvest your data because they're a pre-profit startup company.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    WebRTC mandates end-to-end encryption, but that's for the web browsers. Can you please link me to evidence that Telegram does not have any way to encrypt video or audio calls? You say Telegram is a for-profit company, but I am not sure how Telegram makes money, at all. It was approached by various government agencies looking for backdoors and claims to have rebuffed them all. Unless the whole thing with the founder of vkontakte having to give up his shares to mail.ru and run, was staged, I'm pretty sure he's an anarcho-capitalist who isn't very happy with states having data. So if that's the case, Telegram (unlike Moxie Marlinspike and Jan Koum) is much less likely to sell out their platform down the line.
  - lucb1e 6y ago
gre 6y ago
Centralized servers for the lose
- oblio 6y ago
  How would things work in practice for a decentralized network? Regular people won't host their own servers.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Probably like email or all the other decentralized services the federated people talk about. Email didn't get mass adoption until centralized servers like Hotmail and Yahoo came online. People don't want to run their own servers and now a days it's a lot more work to do so.
    - eredengrin 6y ago
      As a "federated person", yes, an email sort of scenario is exactly what I'd like, or at least it would be many times better than what we currently have for im systems. The most important thing to me (and I suspect many other people in favor of decentralization/federation) is the ability to host my own service. I couldn't care less if 90% of email users are on gmail as long as I can run own email server or pay someone else to run one for me while still communicating with everyone.
  - sschueller 6y ago
    Take a look at https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    I keep seeing this argument, and we all know it's bs. 20 years ago there were many email providers, people simply picked one, or hired someone to set it up and run it for them. The same principles should and could apply for decentralized one; pick conversations.im for XMPP, pick matrix.org for Matrix, pick Mastodon.social for fediverse - or something smaller. Or ask someone to do it for you. Or run your own.
sean_pedersen 6y ago
Time to jump ship! Use element / matrix an open, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol with slick clients for Android, iOS, Desktop & Web: https://element.io/ https://element.io/ Also easy to self-host a server, if you need full control: $ mkdir -p ~/synapse $ pip3.6 install --user jinja2 matrix-synapse $ cd ~/synapse $ python3.6 -m synapse.app.homeserver \ --server-name my.domain.name \ --config-path homeserver.yaml \ --generate-config \ --report-stats=no
- corndoge 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll send this guide to my mom!
  - helmholtz 6y ago
    Exactly. GP's comment is the most HN thing I've every seen.
  - philshem 6y ago
    my mom uses at least python3.8
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    send your mom to https://element.io https://element.io. nobody is asking her to run her own server(!)
    - superkuh 6y ago
      When the lockdowns started I sent my relatively old parents to riot.io. They were able to get it working on their phones and tablets pretty well. The only thing we had trouble with was the riot.io-mediated jitsi multi-person video conference setup. But they handled the basic riot.io setup and 1-to-1 stuff fine.
  - easton 6y ago
    I would too, but my mom is still working on setting up automatic syncing folders with NFS since Dropbox is just a derivative idea.
afroisalreadyin 6y ago
This is bad. I spent a lot of time and effort getting non-techie friends to switch from whatsapp, and now what is supposed to be the best alternative is having a massive downtime. I think I'll just give up.
- njsubedi 6y ago
  Please don’t give up so fast.
- dbg31415 6y ago
  Totally agree, but looks like they just got Slashdotted. Hard to imagine it'll be down much longer. Shame they couldn't anticipate this, or scale better. Curious what their postmortem will have in it.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  If there was ever a time it was going to go down its preciously after qulck exponential growth in the 10s of millions of users.
- mackrevinack 6y ago
  has whatsapp never had an outrage?
  - dunefox 6y ago
    I don't remember it having an outage of 24 hours.
- dunefox 6y ago
  I have given up too - people are complaining to me (via WhatsApp since it just works) because I recommended Signal and they signed up. Now I'm the guy whose recommendations are probably going to be ignored. Signal just isn't suitable as a replacement/daily chat app...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tonymet 6y ago
Anyone know what their backend is? Is it an erlang stack like Whatsapp?
- superdisk 6y ago
  Java. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
- 01acheru 6y ago
  It's written in Java using the Dropwizard framework. I've skimmed through the code and found references to Protobuf, GCM and Redis It's open source so you can check the code here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
  - mshroyer 6y ago
    It looks like mostly blocking code... I wonder if that's hampering their ability to scale.
tonymet 6y ago
Snowden showed that Signal went from 10mil to 50mil downloads in 1 week (since competitor TOS changes & Tech-industry censorship)
- tonymet 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1350123606601322496 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1350123606601322496
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Signal themselves posted that screenshot, Snowden retweeted.
mlindner 6y ago
Signal is having problems because of how "successful" they are being right now. This is a good problem not a bad problem. They'll adapt.
njsubedi 6y ago
I think it’s because many people from India joined Signal after Dhruv Rathee published a video suggesting people uninstall WhatsApp and install Signal or Telegram. He’s got 1.7M views within a day, and I’m sure he’s bringing lot of new users to Signal [and NordVPN because of the paid promotion].
lerax 6y ago
Simple, they are not resilient as Telegram is. They are not Russian.
- sschueller 6y ago
  The best hackers do appear to all live in Russia...
exabrial 6y ago
How to fix: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/
lerax 6y ago
Forget Signal. Use Telegram, I use since 2013 without any regrets. WhatsApp it was always inferior anyway.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 6y ago
  People jumping to signal likely are looking for privacy. The only app that guarantees that right now, with minimal configuration, is Signal. Jumping from Facebook or WhatsApp to Telegram doesn't make any sense from a privacy perspective. Well Telegram supports secret chats, It unfortunately defaults to non-secret chats, which are just to secure as any old Facebook post. In fact, if we're comparing WhatsApp to Telegram, from a privacy perspective, you would be giving up more data by switching to Telegram because WhatsApp is completely end to end encrypted by default.
muunbo 6y ago
This is a positive sign - it means there've been so many more signups lately! I did just convert a whole bunch of close friends over to Signal this past week, so I hope they can ride out this temporary outage and not leave the service :'( It took too much 'social effort' to move them all over
- dunefox 6y ago
  No, it's a negative sign since half of the ~dozen people I got over to Signal are complaining and will probably go back to WA since Signal is still down after almost a whole day. The other half will probably go back if this takes much longer.
de11 6y ago
It's ok
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Cyclone_ 6y ago
I deleted the app after it deleted all of my texts and wouldn't open. I still think encrypted messaging is very important, but not sure signal has done a great job with their implementation. Compared to the default android app it's always been quite buggy
iphorde 6y ago
I am betting it is the Feds. They want visibility into everyone's conversations. They want power. Welcome to your dystopian future.
chopin24 6y ago
For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.
- thepasswordis 6y ago
  Can we please stop it with the sexist/ageist "old lady as a standin for incompetent" tech bro stereotype here? Not really befitting of this place.
  - dxdm 6y ago
    My mum is such an aunt, she makes no secret of often being baffled by her smart phone, she doesn't know all the right words, but she's curious, she tries, and really appreciates apps that are easy to use, with her in mind.
  - shsbdhx 6y ago
    Why? For all you know, the OP had specifically his/her aunt in mind. If I wrote that, I’d have my 93 year old grandma who got Signal years in mind. She’s i it because because I refuse to share pictures of my kids otherwise. Or maybe I’d have my sister in mind. The older one of the two, who has zero interest in this stuff. My youngest sister, OTOH would just as likely advice me to adopt some technology. All this ranging about fake (and it is fake) politeness is oppressive to the thought process. And it’s very irksome and tiring. When I speak, I want to say something. Not stop and figure out which real an imagined person with a disadvantage might perceive a slight where none is intended. If I mean to insult you, you’ll know. When you write instructions to others, by all means, make the “idiot” a young white man from the Midwest. I don’t care. But, just so you know, my grandma is an inspiration of fierce independence (she lives alone in a bad neighborhood in a third world country ). My sister who doesn’t care about tech is brilliant. They just don’t care about apps. And it’s ok.
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    My boss just learned last week that he could reject phonecalls on android…
Triv888 6y ago
having issues implementing NSA's new code? /s
jandrese 6y ago
Wow, at first I thought "they finally hit their limit with the new signups." but now they've been down for a couple of hours and I'm starting to worry that it might be more severe.
- tombert 6y ago
  Same here. I had assumed there was an "oh crap!" moment, and the solution might be as simple as provisioning bigger/more boxes from AWS (or whatever provider they use), and this could be resolved in an hour. I'm a bit worried that maybe the problem is more architectural and it might require a more substantial code change. Then again, most "auto-scaling" algorithms aren't really expecting you to quintuple your active user-base in a week. Obviously I'm not going to complain that a free service isn't working for me 100% of the time, and I'm not "angry" or anything, but I hope this is resolved soon; pretty much the only way I talk to my friends and family is via Signal.
afrcnc 6y ago
As with most sudden expansions, this was to be expected, tbh
stonesweep 6y ago
For those unaware, the Signal protocol developed by Open Whisper (previous name) is what was adopted by WhatsApp / Facebook Messenger / Skype and possibly others. In a sense, Signal is the original reference implementation of the specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol
- z77dj3kl 6y ago
  Facebook Messenger at least does not use the protocol by default, maybe for secret conversations. But the Signal folks did indeed help WhatsApp implement the Signal protocol, which is kind of ironic.
NanoWar 6y ago
I donated 10$, hope that helps a bit in the long run! Happy switcher from WhatsApp, dragging all family members with me ;)
frakkingcylons 6y ago
Happy user for the last three years, donated $20
Daniel_sk 6y ago
"We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience." https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464
- Daniel_sk 6y ago
  "We are making progress towards getting the service back online. Privacy is our top priority, but adding capacity is a close second right now." https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350185818527211521 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350185818527211521
  - baby 6y ago
    can't wait for the post mortem : o really wondering why there's an outage. I assume the SGX stuff quickly became a bottleneck, or the message forwarding server wasn't made to scale out very efficiently. In any case, they should have been able to have a very large queue in front of these components and just have a very slow system, probably something blew up due to the sudden peak of users.
    - Daniel_sk 6y ago
      My guess: https://twitter.com/NovakDaniel/status/1350471722034745348 https://twitter.com/NovakDaniel/status/1350471722034745348
- ibejoeb 6y ago
  > Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters Awesome
- topkeks 6y ago
  Does anyone outside Signal Foundation know how's their architecture? There are a lot of references to AWS, GCP, and Azure in the source code hosted in GitHub so they probably use them all in one way or another. It would be super interesting know more details about the infrastructure.
foobandit 6y ago
I suspect this is related to all of the people getting kicked off of other social media platforms. Signal may be becoming the platform of choice for the far-right to share disinformation and organize.
- Steltek 6y ago
  I believe it's more to do with users abandoning WhatsApp due to the concerning privacy policy that Apple forced them to disclose to their users. Many high profile influencers are recommending people switch to Signal.
- DataSceince123 6y ago
  yes, this is why we need to get signal banned
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  Oh no. Better remove it from the app stores, and restrict the impressions of posts that make mention of it on other social media platforms.
bilal4hmed 6y ago
Just saw this on Reddit, another easy to way to increase donations For AMEX Platinum cardholders there’s a promotion for a $30 credit per month for things paid via PayPal, make AMEX donate
frEdmbx 6y ago
As long as we tolerate the world reserve fiat global enslavement system, everything that can be corrupted will be corrupted.
may4m 6y ago
I use huawei p20 lite 2019 and the signal app is not as smooth and fluid as whatsapp. The animations frames are noticeable. I really want to love the app. I hope they improve the android experience for lower end smart phones
kypro 6y ago
My friends have been switching to signal this last week and I'm really happy I made the switch so far. I just wish it was as easy to switch from Amazon and Google.
dan_linder 6y ago
I just donated to let them know I'm interested in their continued existence. I feel bad - my wife and I have been a user of Signal 100% for the past 4+ years and we wouldn't want to use anything else. For some Signal related education, listen to the Security Now! podcast from 2016 - Steve Gibson dives into the protocol underlying Signal, "Open Whisper Systems".
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Us too. Did you happen to switch over after the election? Assuming you’re American, sorry if that’s not the case!
Niten 6y ago
Is there any data on how many of these new users are WhatsApp refugees vs. Parler refugeees vs. some other category? In principle it shouldn't matter. But I'm worried userbase demographics will determine from which quarter the next legislative threat to end-to-end encryption emerges.
fallingfrog 6y ago
Yeah, I’ll bet they are
458aperta 6y ago
This is a good sign. Thanks to Zuckerberg's mistake, Signal reaps all the rewards. What can we learn from this? Just because you own a platform doesn't mean you have an economic moat. The crowd's sentiment can change overnight and I think Zuck is honestly out of touch with public sentiments. He probably thinks that he can run for US presidency using Facebook as a launchpad but all the money in the world won't fix myopia.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  They do have a massive moat. It's just that if you keep piling up shit, your moat, no matter how deep, will eventually fill up and your users might escape.
mlaretallack 6y ago
We need a Open Inferstructure Foundation...
GRBurst 6y ago
I'm using Signal from the early days on where a lot of stuff wasn't working properly. I try to comvince people for quite some time now and whenever there was like a privacy issue on WhatsApp or other messaging apps, I saw people discovering and moving to Signal. Sadly, whenever there was such an opportunities to shine, they ran into technical difficulties. As a result, many friends tell me on a different messaging app like telegram that they finally tried out signal but moved on because it wasn't working. This makes me very sad and I hope that the Signal team is able to learn from that and plan ahead. @Signal please take your opportunities and make a reminder like a big banner in your office reminding you to ask yourself "is there an opportunity?" Or more concrete "did WhatsApp messed up with privacy?" For me, I will still try to convince more people to switch to signal :-)
- GRBurst 6y ago
  I'd suggest that: Whenever we, the hacker news guys who care for privacy, recognize that there is an opportunity for a privacy concerned development team like Signal -> We send them an e-mail or similar. Since often its really difficult to spot it yourself.
eins1234 6y ago
One thing on my wishlist for Signal that's curiously still missing is the lack of a Web app. On desktop at least, I'm generally of the position that messaging apps should need no capability outside of what's available in my browser (i.e. sending notifications), so when the option is available that's the one I tend to go for (usually have my commonly used ones sitting around in a pinned tab). Pretty much every chat app out there today (including WhatsApp) has a web app. Anyone know why Signal doesn't? Is it just a prioritization/lack of resources thing?
- InvertedRhodium 6y ago
  Signal has a desktop application that works across all platforms. Not sure why it isn't a web application though.
- UFOFlyer 6y ago
  IIRC Signal doesn't have a web app for security reasons. With a iOS/Android/Desktop app, you can verify the checksum of the binary against what signal provides. But with a web app you redownload the application everytime which means you'd have to recheck that checksum every time you use the app. I guess that WhatsApp, Discord, et al have decided that this is a reasonable risk. But the privacy oriented Signal team disagrees. I don't think it's a prioritization issue, the desktop app is currently running via electron which means it's effectively a web app already.
  - sneak 6y ago
    No, you can't verify the checksum; it downloads and runs new code without asking. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4578 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4578
    - eins1234 6y ago
      Wow... I was totally convinced by the security argument until I read through this thread, which completely obsoletes that premise. It's no different from a PWA (like WhatsApp) in its update behavior then.
mancerayder 6y ago
A signal of its own success.
smm11 6y ago
Golly, I just wonder what might be going on when thousands are flocking to encrypted channels like Signal daily.
jeena 6y ago
Interesting, so we're replacing a bad centralized app with a good one instead of a decentralized system like https://matrix.org https://matrix.org
tonymet 6y ago
does signal support direct p2p connections (once the conn is negotiated). I'm guessing some users have uPnP / open socket.
Aeolun 6y ago
How does this happen? You can kind of see your usage quickly run to 100% right? I’d think this is one of those moments that someone is permanently observing the usage to increase capacity when necessary. Also, why can’t I send a message any time, instead of just sometimes?
nimbius 6y ago
I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage. for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture. Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting. Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006. - Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement? - Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios? - Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week? It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture. Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS. A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back. Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.
- whymarrh 6y ago
  I don’t understand, so what? They’re doing their best and if users go somewhere else so be it. I’m sure if they could avoid the outage they would. They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.
perryizgr8 6y ago
What's the endgame with Signal? It is identical to whatsapp in how it works and what features it has/lacks. Whatsapp has big daddy FB to pay the bills (which would be massive for such an app). I doubt Signal can survive on donations from a few privacy conscious users. For a free service, intended to survive with very small amounts of donated money, you need a fundamentally different architecture. Whatsapp was not built for this, and since Signal copied them, neither is Signal. Even if Signal is able to survive on meagre donations, I would think it is a better use of that money to be spent on resilient, distributed architecture than AWS bills. A good architecture ensures sustainability, a large AWS bill just makes Bezos richer.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwitaway1235 6y ago
Due to the timing of this outage, nobody really thinks it's a random technical problem or lack of funding, right? Did the United States attack Signal to further clamp down on speech and private communication?
Ansil849 6y ago
I'm a fan and daily user of Signal, but here is the harsh reality that this outage (going on for more than half a day now) exposes: Signal is not, today, suitable as a primary secure communication channel. Maybe one day when it scales, but not today. Countless critical conversations were disrupted today.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  Signal has critically failed two times in the past year: now, and almost a year ago when they were forcing everyone to create a PIN (and subject their data to their weird SGX-based cloud storage thing) despite users yelling at them how bad of an idea this is. If you didn't want to do it, you were locked out. That one pissed me off a lot more than today's outage, which is understandable, hopefully short, and unlikely to be repeated once they get scaling under control. It's also the reason why I'm not donating today.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Just realized: Shouldn't actual message delivery be easily shardable in Signal, since the server side doesn't know the sender, i.e. you can put each user on a different shard without having much issues with cross-shard communication?
superdisk 6y ago
I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst time to have this happen :/ Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
- vander_elst 6y ago
  I also would have expected a better communication of the outage at least a bit more regularly (at least 1h since it seems to be an extremely large outage). Additionally, the status page, IMO, lacks of some information e.g. what services are up, historical view etc. Anyway, thrilled to see how it will change after this incident. In the meantime, best of luck to the signal sre team.
- suyash 6y ago
  give them 24-48 hours, it's a small team and they got a massive surge
- leipert 6y ago
  FWIW I sent messages earlier without a problem. Judging from their jobs page they are just hiring in US time zones, so it’s understandable that they might run out of steam after an incident going on into the middle of the night. HugOps! Hope they get it fully running soon. Maybe they’ll provide a good, public root cause analysis and I hope that they rethink hiring in order to get more TZ coverage.
- mike_d 6y ago
  > They're running on AWS The client entry point (api.directory.signal.org) seems to be pointing exclusively to Azure and IBM Cloud depending on geography. It looks like just DNS, the website, and maybe some backend stuff are on AWS. > should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops Who exactly is going to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud spend you propose they turn up?
jbverschoor 6y ago
Whatsapp never had issues running their erlang platform..
zakki 6y ago
I can send and receive messages now
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
It's very poor on anyone to be so toxic about free, valued services and then at first fail jump to public media to scream outrage. Signal is going to be better than ever by going through these moments and improving the platform. I don't mind the inconvenience and don't expect premium quality with five nines of availability. I'm not in a position to complain.
techmememe 6y ago
You can still use the old version called Silence.im, it was not behind a central server, used MMS to exchange private keys.
sillycube 6y ago
Are there many new US users using Signal now?
theloneshark 6y ago
I glanced through very interesting discussions below(sorry, if this is repeated question) I was wondering if it is time to define basic rights of an individual in the internet. - Free & fair access to information(not controlled by any corporation) for everyone [wikipedia?] - Free communication (emails, messaging, calls) for everyone [signal?] How do we structure this? Donations(private individuals, users, governments?), usage fees(annual subscriptions for a household?) or some other payment model we haven't discovered yet (like USPS stamps/postage fee - PAYG)

907 points by tonymet 6y ago

The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. As much as I love Signal, we've got to move to things that are decentralized. I setup a prosody[1] server a while back, but have nobody to talk with. If anyone wants to try their system out, I'm bjt@2n3904.net on XMPP. 1 - https://prosody.im/ https://prosody.im/

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
I can't figure out how to use it. xD
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  It's not the easiest thing to setup. There's a few places I'm sure which let you get free XMPP accounts, and a handful of good clients. I'm using Conversations for Android. If you have a server that will allow self service registration, you can make an account right from the app.
Zash 6y ago
Hi, Prosody dev here. It looks like your server isn't reachable. If you'd like help with that you can join the community support channel: https://prosody.im/discuss/ https://prosody.im/discuss/
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  Aww beans. I looked at the IM observatory, and it seemed to check out fine...
  - Zash 6y ago
    Tried the server-to-server test?
    - bjt2n3904 6y ago
      Ahh cripes, I had port 5269 blocked. Whoop! Running the test now, thanks for the help! Edit: Aaand I'm up! Got my first message. Thank you for your help, and for your work on Prosody!
      - zamadatix 6y ago
        And herein lies the reason decentralized isnt about uptime, when the server you use is down its down regardless how many use it and it doesn't matter to you others still work. It'll probably get more downtime over the years than the mega important one as well. That's not to say decentralized doesn't have a ton of benefits just uptime for the user isnt one.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Out of interest, why was the Windows download deprecated? It's a bit much to expect mom & pop to be playing with WSL?
kortex 6y ago
I thought signal was highly decentralized? What traffic does the server handle once two clients have "found" each other? Which I believe uses hashes of phone numbers.
- okso 6y ago
  This article from 2018 illustrates the architecture of Signal: https://sorincocorada.ro/signal-messanger-architecture/ https://sorincocorada.ro/signal-messanger-architecture/
  - Reedx 6y ago
    Based on that, they use Google, Apple, Twilio and AWS in the backend. All who have shown they are willing to deplatform with little notice as the result of kneejerk public pressure. How easily can Signal replace those dependencies if this comes for them? "Extremists move to secret online channels": https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/extremists-move-secret-line-channels-plan-inauguration-day-d-c-n1253876 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/extremists-move-se...
    - okso 6y ago
      As far as I know, Google and Apple are only used to send Push notifications to users. These are optional, and Signal on Android can be used without Google. AWS S3 is/was used to share files with other users. It became a standardized API, with many alternatives supporting the protocol, so switching to a different provider or on-premises should not be difficult. Signal intends to remove the dependency on phone numbers, and therefore Twilio, but this has not be done yet.
    - scambier 6y ago
      All IM apps rely on Google or Apple (on their respective platforms) for the push notifications. The alternative is polling in relatively small intervals, but that wakes up the app, which uses the battery without any real usage. And if the OS decides to kill your app's process, your polling dies with it and you don't get notifications.
  - 6y ago
zrm 6y ago
I wonder if Signal would be open to doing that. I know they don't like third party implementations because then if you need to make a protocol change you'd have to wait 30 years for everyone else to update their clients. But if you're already requiring a single client that it makes it easier to do decentralized messaging for exactly the same reason. Another option that works pretty well is to do both. So try decentralized (DHT / direct connection) first and fallback to a central server if that doesn't work. Then you're up as long as either one of them is working. And there is a lot less load on your central servers.
samstave 6y ago
Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Do you need a static IP? (Xfinity appears alergic to allowing static IPs any more, and I am too lazy to setup my own router after 26 years setting up other peoples net infra..) Id love to chat with you...
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  I'm sure you can... but I think one of the big hiccups is that you need DNS to point to your server if you want it to be externally available. I've used XMPP servers for intra-organization chatservers before though, and it worked great!
- upofadown 6y ago
  >Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Sure. >Do you need a static IP? Well you need a domain name to identify your server. It's the same thing as with email. So however you can do that... It might be less work to just use a preexisting public server: * https://list.jabber.at/ https://list.jabber.at/
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Easily. > Do you need a static IP? No, but you need access to a domain record to add the required entries for XMPP, and update them if your IP changes. One can do this for free (once you have a domain that points at their DNS records) with a provider like Digitalocean and their API to update the domains. Set up guides: https://prosody.im/doc https://prosody.im/doc Community to ask: https://homebrewserver.club/ https://homebrewserver.club/
olah_1 6y ago
Of course there are protocols like XMPP and Matrix. But there are also solutions that don’t require everyone to host their own server. Rather, people just host impersonal nodes on the network and everyone uses the whole network together. Examples would be Status[1] (Ethereum) and Session[2] (Oxen neé Loki). I’m sure there are others that use this architecture too. I just like it because I don’t have to be personally concerned with who is running my “home server”. Because there is no one single home server in this model. [1]: https://status.im/ https://status.im/ [2]: https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/
- lucb1e 6y ago
  How does that work, though? You need to have some central database of user IDs, or can you just never have a user ID and will you need to add people by full public key. As soon as you try to map big public keys to a phone number, username, or some other short ID, you need some registration system, probably on a FCFS basis. How does that work in this "you can run but not manage your own server" type decentralized system? And who prevents message spam / abuse handling? It sounds like these must be centralized systems presented as decentralization, similar to how Keybase marketed themselves as end to end encrypted and nobody noticed that you can't actually verify peer's keys thus making it TOFU (similar to blindly accepting ssh keys). (And when you asked people about their claims about Keybase, they'd tell you to RTFM regardless of whether you already said you did that... A marketing department can be very powerful even on HN.)
  - olah_1 6y ago
    Status uses public keys, but you can optionally link an Ethereum Domain Name (ENS). So it’s basically like license plates where you can buy a vanity plate if you want. Also, friends can just add their own nickname for you in their contacts. Personally I think that’s the best way to do it. Public keys aren’t very different from phone numbers at this point. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore either. Each person just has their own Rolodex mapping of keys to names.
oblio 6y ago
> The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. Is there any decentralized protocol that's in widespread use? Email is the only one, and if hackers take out Gmail and 2-3 other major email providers 99% of the world's personal email is gone.
- remirk 6y ago
  The web.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Touche.

robotbikes 6y ago

This is the first big outage I've felt affects me personally in any meaningful way as someone who has tried to stay away from overly depending on cloud services and SaaS like Gmail or slack. I first noticed that a couple of hours ago my messages seemed to be hanging and going through without the typical confirmation. The status page has no more information than the title at this point.

tomp 6y ago

At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").

LordAtlas 6y ago
I don't see a banner on the top of my app. I only found out when the desktop client kept timing out with 502 errors and after asking on Twitter, found other people were having issues too. It's there on https://status.signal.org/ https://status.signal.org/ though.
- vecio 6y ago
  There is a banner in the Android app, not on the desktop.
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    The desktop app shows a yellow "DISCONNECTED - Check your network connection" warning. They probably should work on better error/status reporting in next version.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Desktop app is still behind the mobile in a few things but they are getting closer these days
      - spurgu 6y ago
        Yeah I was very positively surprised to find that the desktop app has a large number of useful keyboard shortcuts: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036517511-Signal-Desktop-Keyboard-Shortcuts https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036517511-Si...

tonymet 6y ago

I noticed this in messages taking about 30s to confirm sending. But the service has been reliable and clear feedback when messages are failing

bitcharmer 6y ago

I still get notifications about incoming messages, just can't read them because the app rejects my passphrase. This has been going on for more than an hour now. If they aim at picking up whatsapp refugees, this is pretty bad.

luxuryballs 6y ago

good for them to be open about it because it’s easy for internet weirdness to be suspicious these days, my buddy just about shat a brick when a message with the newly leaked video from Fulton GA suddenly vanished: https://www.bitchute.com/video/lep8A5YTQ0P3/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/lep8A5YTQ0P3/

dmcbrayer 6y ago
I'm curious how a link to a Fulton County board of elections surveillance video has anything to do with Signal's availability issues.
- luxuryballs 6y ago
  Did you read the rest of the comment? Without the link for context and given recent censorship of this kind of stuff I figured it might have seemed a little bit paranoid.

mahdyarhp 6y ago

They are not Telegram. They can't handle millions of users in a short period of time, although it's not on them, it's Telegram's magic.

fastball 6y ago
I think it's less magic and more the lack of E2EE.
- konart 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with encryption and how does either of services work on the backend, but shouldn't E2E happen on users devices? (like... end to end). And if that's the case - how does this impact Signal's infrastructure?
  - fastball 6y ago
    - You need to orchestrate key exchange between clients which is additional overhead (probs negligible). - Messages can't be edited so any corrections made by users need to be entirely new transmission over the wire (probs negligible) - Encrypted data can't be effectively compressed, and compression before encryption can lead to side-channel attacks. You can generally mitigate this by building your compression and encryption together (e.g. SSL does this), but not entirely sure this works for Signal with an E2EE arch. Either way I would assume that E2EE payload sizes transmitted over the wire are larger than stuff sent over the wire with GZIP/SSL (as Telegram is probably doing). - MAIN REASON (my guess): group chats in the Signal protocol require sending a different encrypted message to each participant, rather than a single identical message to all participants. Honestly my algorithmic complexity chops aren't the best, but I think that would make Signal group chats O[2n] while Telegram group chats are more like O[log n], if they utilize clients sending the group chat to each other, which is a crazy level of difference in efficiency for what is effectively the same thing and a pretty common use case (group chats). Long story short, secure things that are hard to mess with are less efficient than things that are easier to mess with. This is why blockchains like Bitcoin are much more lethargic than a normal database – there are some necessary performance trade-offs required when you want high levels of security in your system. There are a bunch of small little things that probably aren't a big deal, but every little bit adds up when you're trying to scale a service to millions of active users / billions of messages.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago

Nice workaround for Android users: tap and hold the send button to switch to SMS (insecure but still) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Can-I-send-SMS-MMS-with-Signal- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca... You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.

manesioz 6y ago
I use the Signal app as my default for everything because of this feature (secure communication with Signal users and insecure SMS with non-Signal users)
bzb6 6y ago
What a workaround. SMS are not encrypted, cost money, have a length limit, don’t support images or groups...
- xeromal 6y ago
  I didn't know some places still charge for SMS
  - sgt 6y ago
    I think they charge for SMS pretty much anywhere outside the US.
    - xeromal 6y ago
      Wow, thanks for the info. That stinks!
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
      No one pays for SMS in France. And probably in most European countries.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

samstave 6y ago

FYI - check the JRE ep with Moxy Marlinspike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0NkT6gbP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0NkT6gbP0 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uVHiMqqJxy8iR2YB63aeP https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uVHiMqqJxy8iR2YB63aeP === (Clearly downvoted by idiots who didnt even watch the short edit about signal... HN has an arrogance problem... Moxy Marlinspike is the founder of signal - and he talks about why he did so... Listen to him...)

mackrevinack 6y ago
a lot of people are pissed about the podcast moving to spotify as well
- samstave 6y ago
  Why? Youtube is trash now... For example, I have never once received a "you should watch this as well" decent recommendation from Youtube, the sidebar is absolute garbage and cant even keep the concept of a topic-thread... Youtube is total trash.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Are you logged in? Because I don't think they tailor their recommendations much to non-logged in users. I get lots of recommendations that end up being good videos.

vecio 6y ago

I'm working on another open source Messenger on Signal protocol. https://mixin.one/messenger https://mixin.one/messenger

mlindner 6y ago
Signal is having difficulties because of load. Does your messenger have ways of reducing load?

tonymet 6y ago

Is it possible to switch to backup Signal server within app? i'm researching running my own in emergencies.

robrtsql 6y ago
Signal is totally centralized. The server is (if I recall correctly) open source, but if you were to run your own server, all of your contacts would have to be using your server too in order to communicate with them. I assume that the hostname(s) of the central Signal servers are hardcoded in the app somewhere, since they're not meant to be replaced.
- z77dj3kl 6y ago
  That's right https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/bac01d739403afc9bfc3d4997adc5e4a28612044/SignalServiceKit/src/TSConstants.swift#L157-L167 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/bac01d739403afc...
- schoolornot 6y ago
  Server is open source but good luck setting it up. There is no documentation for it. Also, they have intentionally excluded the option for clients to connect to alternate servers. This stance really rubs me the wrong way. I love the Signal protocol, everything else is kinda meh.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > Also, they have intentionally excluded the option for clients to connect to alternate servers. Since Signal doesn't federate, if you switched your client to an alternate server you would be unable to communicate with the 99.9% of people out there using the official Signal server. Signal isn't going to give a UI option that is certain to cause frustration and bafflement for the vast majority of users. Those wanting to use an alternate server are probably a small nerd niche who already know how to fork the client.
neltnerb 6y ago

tinyhouse 6y ago

Hopefully it'd teach them a lesson to stay humble after their stupid recent tweets laughing at whatsapp indirectly.

arunc 6y ago

Why not do a some kind of lazy P2P instead of proactive P2P? IIRC, Signal calls are P2P.

barbs 6y ago
I believe the calls still require the server to bootstrap to connection but I could be wrong.
RIMR 6y ago
Wait, so I can geolocate someone and figure out their ISP by starting a Signal call? Great feature, I love it!
- spiznnx 6y ago
  Yes, if they pick up, but you can disable p2p in the settings.
- aarchi 6y ago
  Calls can be relayed through Signal servers: > Always relay calls: > Relay all calls through the Signal server to avoid revealing your IP address to your contact. Enabling will reduce call quality.
sschueller 6y ago
https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ decentralized, encrypted, p2p, no phone number required. I'm not sure why nobody uses it.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Because it's incredibly unstable, and horrible to use? Yes, tried it, even earlier, when it was called GNUsomething. EDIT Ring. It was called Ring.

hcurtiss 6y ago

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

faitswulff 6y ago
But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware. I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there". Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    Young people are (generally) fans of corporate governance and government overreach. It's older "boomer" types who feel threatened by the new religion of sensitivity and cancel culture who worry about corporate governance and government overreach. Please don't be pedantic on my comment and try to understand the general picture I am painting, you'll find the gist of the comment to be true even if I didn't articulate it super well. Thanks.
  - sedev 6y ago

tsjq 6y ago

Is this being caused by the tons of WhatsApp users joining Signal ?

rantwasp 6y ago
or parler users, or twitter users, or disgruntled telegram users. could be multiple issues
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  Kind of the perfect storm.
beervirus 6y ago
My wife out of the blue just started asking if she should switch from WhatsApp to signal. What’s causing the exodus?
- momothereal 6y ago
  WhatsApp updated/clarified their Privacy Policy, which states they share PII with Facebook (their parent company).
  - mxxx 6y ago
    Surely it’s not this alone. Most of the people who seem to be switching that I know still use Facebook itself anyway?
    - momothereal 6y ago
      If you want more context/discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 The background here is that WhatsApp previously stated that they would never share user data for profit, i.e., not selling ads [1]. Reading that blog post leaves a sour taste in HN's collective mouth, because not 2 years later they would get acquired by the ad giant Facebook and now mandate that users agree to share their data with FB. The wording made it seem like accounts that didn't agree with the new policies would get terminated on February 8th. A few days later, WhatsApp posted [2] that their update was misinterpreted by users and media, and that the clarifications to their policies were to increase transparency. They also pushed the ultimatum for a few months. [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads [2] https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-update https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-up...

dboreham 6y ago

Demand a refund!

drummer 6y ago

I remember years ago back when I still used WhatsApp when there would also be temporary outages due to huge increase in traffic/popularity. Growing pains. I would have hoped, though, that the engineers at Signal would have foreseen this and would have been prepared.

Datagenerator 6y ago

Quite feasible no competition is allowed and they resorted to DDoS the new neighbor. Support government backdoors or get hammered.

markhalonen 6y ago

After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.

sjaak 6y ago
Burned by Keybase how? It's still online and functional afaik. Do you mean the cryptocurrency shenanigans, the acquisition, ..?
- markhalonen 6y ago
  the acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430
olah_1 6y ago
How did you get burned by Keybase? An outage or something else? I know in their own terms they basically say “we can delete your account, but we won’t”. I chuckled and never bothered.
- rvz 6y ago
  "Ultimately, Keybase's 'future' is in Zoom's hands." [0] That is what the parent comment is talking about. [0] https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom
lucb1e 6y ago
I'd estimate that Signal is a fair bit better than Keybase since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place. But since you're on Matrix now, of course that's self hosted and as stable as you make it yourself. Decentralization for the win, kudos for going with an even better solution (even if I disagree about Signal not being a stable choice)!
- 6y ago

shafyy 6y ago

Just a friendly reminder that Signal runs on donations and that if you can go and give them some money: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/

lucb1e 6y ago
Or that you can use that money for a Matrix server instead of supporting centralization. Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
- oblio 6y ago
  Which Matrix server?
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    E.g. OVH, Hetzner, TransIP... idk whatever kinda server you like. Or repurpose an old laptop at home, for a few Watts you get something that's usually more powerful per ¤ than a VPSes (or "cloud instances" in newspeak). Then install a Matrix server, add your domain, and you've got your own Signal alternative. Or just use the standard matrix.org home server if you're just trying it out / don't mind a not-super-fast home server. Or one of a dozen public Matrix servers: https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php
    - oblio 6y ago
      IRC all over again. I don't see this taking over until someone comes up with its Gmail.
      - ripdog 6y ago
        'its gmail' is matrix.org. It is the default server when you start up Element.

alan5 6y ago

I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/

jrochkind1 6y ago
your comment led me to do same!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
olah_1 6y ago
We have no info as to how much money they need or how much they currently have. For all we know, this was just an area of oversight and not related to funding at all. I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.
- too_pricey 6y ago
  They're a non-profit, so their financials are publicly disclosed. ProPublica only has it as recently as 2018, but here was the financials then: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/824506840/12_2019_prefixes_82-86%2F824506840_201812_990_2019121216951146 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
  - olah_1 6y ago
    That’s helpful, thanks. So they’re 4mil in the hole? How is it possible that they’re still running?
    - bilal4hmed 6y ago

JuliusMars 6y ago

I don't believe in coincidences

lvs 6y ago

DNS is resolving correctly again to AWS, but the servers are 504 timeout.

sschueller 6y ago
So technically if amazon didn't like signal they could kick them off and the whole network goes to shit. Where do people think all these parlor users are going?

earth2mars 6y ago

I am very interested in hearing the postmortem of this extended outage technology/architecture stand point. Not to be cynical, but I wonder if this is caused by an attack by the company who is losing users!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
faitswulff 6y ago
I doubt we’ll get much info about it out of Signal / OWS. I’ve asked about their tech stack and ability to scale in AMAs before and got fairly vague responses.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  The server code was published. Even if we don't know what services they use, you should be able to find quite easily what language the stuff is written in.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    Server code may not tell you what the server is deployed on.
    - lucb1e 6y ago
      Hence my writing of > Even if we don't know what services they use and it merely helping to find > what language the [server] stuff is written in
      - faitswulff 6y ago
        I don’t understand how that will help you figure out the equivalent of a post mortem for a service outage.
        6y ago

EGreg 6y ago

Guess who is not having technical difficulties, ever: Telegram They are going to be the next Facebook. I don't understand why people underestimate them so much. When they rolled their own crypto in some areas, people made fun of them, yet no one could break it. When they published their source code openly, people say they aren't open source like signal. When FB bought WhatsApp, people seriously continued to choose it over Telegram, despite Telegram able to host much bigger chats, and so on. And being used all over the world, by the same government officials who were officially trying to get it offline LMAO. I just don't get what's so bad about Telegram.

scubbo 6y ago
> They are going to be the next Facebook > I just don't get what's so bad about Telegram. Pick one.
mlindner 6y ago
Well first off Telegram doesn't actually do end to end encryption unless you manually opt in. They don't allow end to end encrypted voice or video calls. They don't allow end to end encrypted group chats. Telegram is also a for-profit company that has no guarantees that they'll continue to not harvest your data because they're a pre-profit startup company.
- EGreg 6y ago
  WebRTC mandates end-to-end encryption, but that's for the web browsers. Can you please link me to evidence that Telegram does not have any way to encrypt video or audio calls? You say Telegram is a for-profit company, but I am not sure how Telegram makes money, at all. It was approached by various government agencies looking for backdoors and claims to have rebuffed them all. Unless the whole thing with the founder of vkontakte having to give up his shares to mail.ru and run, was staged, I'm pretty sure he's an anarcho-capitalist who isn't very happy with states having data. So if that's the case, Telegram (unlike Moxie Marlinspike and Jan Koum) is much less likely to sell out their platform down the line.
- lucb1e 6y ago

gre 6y ago

Centralized servers for the lose

oblio 6y ago
How would things work in practice for a decentralized network? Regular people won't host their own servers.
- godelski 6y ago
  Probably like email or all the other decentralized services the federated people talk about. Email didn't get mass adoption until centralized servers like Hotmail and Yahoo came online. People don't want to run their own servers and now a days it's a lot more work to do so.
  - eredengrin 6y ago
    As a "federated person", yes, an email sort of scenario is exactly what I'd like, or at least it would be many times better than what we currently have for im systems. The most important thing to me (and I suspect many other people in favor of decentralization/federation) is the ability to host my own service. I couldn't care less if 90% of email users are on gmail as long as I can run own email server or pay someone else to run one for me while still communicating with everyone.
- sschueller 6y ago
  Take a look at https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/
- pmlnr 6y ago
  I keep seeing this argument, and we all know it's bs. 20 years ago there were many email providers, people simply picked one, or hired someone to set it up and run it for them. The same principles should and could apply for decentralized one; pick conversations.im for XMPP, pick matrix.org for Matrix, pick Mastodon.social for fediverse - or something smaller. Or ask someone to do it for you. Or run your own.

sean_pedersen 6y ago

Time to jump ship! Use element / matrix an open, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol with slick clients for Android, iOS, Desktop & Web: https://element.io/ https://element.io/ Also easy to self-host a server, if you need full control: $ mkdir -p ~/synapse $ pip3.6 install --user jinja2 matrix-synapse $ cd ~/synapse $ python3.6 -m synapse.app.homeserver \ --server-name my.domain.name \ --config-path homeserver.yaml \ --generate-config \ --report-stats=no

corndoge 6y ago
Thanks, I'll send this guide to my mom!
- helmholtz 6y ago
  Exactly. GP's comment is the most HN thing I've every seen.
- philshem 6y ago
  my mom uses at least python3.8
- Arathorn 6y ago
  send your mom to https://element.io https://element.io. nobody is asking her to run her own server(!)
  - superkuh 6y ago
    When the lockdowns started I sent my relatively old parents to riot.io. They were able to get it working on their phones and tablets pretty well. The only thing we had trouble with was the riot.io-mediated jitsi multi-person video conference setup. But they handled the basic riot.io setup and 1-to-1 stuff fine.
- easton 6y ago
  I would too, but my mom is still working on setting up automatic syncing folders with NFS since Dropbox is just a derivative idea.

afroisalreadyin 6y ago

This is bad. I spent a lot of time and effort getting non-techie friends to switch from whatsapp, and now what is supposed to be the best alternative is having a massive downtime. I think I'll just give up.

njsubedi 6y ago
Please don’t give up so fast.
dbg31415 6y ago
Totally agree, but looks like they just got Slashdotted. Hard to imagine it'll be down much longer. Shame they couldn't anticipate this, or scale better. Curious what their postmortem will have in it.
zamadatix 6y ago
If there was ever a time it was going to go down its preciously after qulck exponential growth in the 10s of millions of users.
mackrevinack 6y ago
has whatsapp never had an outrage?
- dunefox 6y ago
  I don't remember it having an outage of 24 hours.
dunefox 6y ago
I have given up too - people are complaining to me (via WhatsApp since it just works) because I recommended Signal and they signed up. Now I'm the guy whose recommendations are probably going to be ignored. Signal just isn't suitable as a replacement/daily chat app...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tonymet 6y ago

Anyone know what their backend is? Is it an erlang stack like Whatsapp?

superdisk 6y ago
Java. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
01acheru 6y ago
It's written in Java using the Dropwizard framework. I've skimmed through the code and found references to Protobuf, GCM and Redis It's open source so you can check the code here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
- mshroyer 6y ago
  It looks like mostly blocking code... I wonder if that's hampering their ability to scale.

tonymet 6y ago

Snowden showed that Signal went from 10mil to 50mil downloads in 1 week (since competitor TOS changes & Tech-industry censorship)

tonymet 6y ago
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1350123606601322496 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1350123606601322496
lucb1e 6y ago
Signal themselves posted that screenshot, Snowden retweeted.

mlindner 6y ago

Signal is having problems because of how "successful" they are being right now. This is a good problem not a bad problem. They'll adapt.

njsubedi 6y ago

I think it’s because many people from India joined Signal after Dhruv Rathee published a video suggesting people uninstall WhatsApp and install Signal or Telegram. He’s got 1.7M views within a day, and I’m sure he’s bringing lot of new users to Signal [and NordVPN because of the paid promotion].

lerax 6y ago

Simple, they are not resilient as Telegram is. They are not Russian.

sschueller 6y ago
The best hackers do appear to all live in Russia...

exabrial 6y ago

How to fix: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/

lerax 6y ago

Forget Signal. Use Telegram, I use since 2013 without any regrets. WhatsApp it was always inferior anyway.

7v3x3n3sem9vv 6y ago
People jumping to signal likely are looking for privacy. The only app that guarantees that right now, with minimal configuration, is Signal. Jumping from Facebook or WhatsApp to Telegram doesn't make any sense from a privacy perspective. Well Telegram supports secret chats, It unfortunately defaults to non-secret chats, which are just to secure as any old Facebook post. In fact, if we're comparing WhatsApp to Telegram, from a privacy perspective, you would be giving up more data by switching to Telegram because WhatsApp is completely end to end encrypted by default.

muunbo 6y ago

This is a positive sign - it means there've been so many more signups lately! I did just convert a whole bunch of close friends over to Signal this past week, so I hope they can ride out this temporary outage and not leave the service :'( It took too much 'social effort' to move them all over

dunefox 6y ago
No, it's a negative sign since half of the ~dozen people I got over to Signal are complaining and will probably go back to WA since Signal is still down after almost a whole day. The other half will probably go back if this takes much longer.

de11 6y ago

It's ok

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Cyclone_ 6y ago

I deleted the app after it deleted all of my texts and wouldn't open. I still think encrypted messaging is very important, but not sure signal has done a great job with their implementation. Compared to the default android app it's always been quite buggy

iphorde 6y ago

I am betting it is the Feds. They want visibility into everyone's conversations. They want power. Welcome to your dystopian future.

chopin24 6y ago

For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.

thepasswordis 6y ago
Can we please stop it with the sexist/ageist "old lady as a standin for incompetent" tech bro stereotype here? Not really befitting of this place.
- dxdm 6y ago
  My mum is such an aunt, she makes no secret of often being baffled by her smart phone, she doesn't know all the right words, but she's curious, she tries, and really appreciates apps that are easy to use, with her in mind.
- shsbdhx 6y ago
  Why? For all you know, the OP had specifically his/her aunt in mind. If I wrote that, I’d have my 93 year old grandma who got Signal years in mind. She’s i it because because I refuse to share pictures of my kids otherwise. Or maybe I’d have my sister in mind. The older one of the two, who has zero interest in this stuff. My youngest sister, OTOH would just as likely advice me to adopt some technology. All this ranging about fake (and it is fake) politeness is oppressive to the thought process. And it’s very irksome and tiring. When I speak, I want to say something. Not stop and figure out which real an imagined person with a disadvantage might perceive a slight where none is intended. If I mean to insult you, you’ll know. When you write instructions to others, by all means, make the “idiot” a young white man from the Midwest. I don’t care. But, just so you know, my grandma is an inspiration of fierce independence (she lives alone in a bad neighborhood in a third world country ). My sister who doesn’t care about tech is brilliant. They just don’t care about apps. And it’s ok.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  My boss just learned last week that he could reject phonecalls on android…

Triv888 6y ago

having issues implementing NSA's new code? /s

jandrese 6y ago

Wow, at first I thought "they finally hit their limit with the new signups." but now they've been down for a couple of hours and I'm starting to worry that it might be more severe.

tombert 6y ago
Same here. I had assumed there was an "oh crap!" moment, and the solution might be as simple as provisioning bigger/more boxes from AWS (or whatever provider they use), and this could be resolved in an hour. I'm a bit worried that maybe the problem is more architectural and it might require a more substantial code change. Then again, most "auto-scaling" algorithms aren't really expecting you to quintuple your active user-base in a week. Obviously I'm not going to complain that a free service isn't working for me 100% of the time, and I'm not "angry" or anything, but I hope this is resolved soon; pretty much the only way I talk to my friends and family is via Signal.

afrcnc 6y ago

As with most sudden expansions, this was to be expected, tbh

stonesweep 6y ago

For those unaware, the Signal protocol developed by Open Whisper (previous name) is what was adopted by WhatsApp / Facebook Messenger / Skype and possibly others. In a sense, Signal is the original reference implementation of the specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol

z77dj3kl 6y ago
Facebook Messenger at least does not use the protocol by default, maybe for secret conversations. But the Signal folks did indeed help WhatsApp implement the Signal protocol, which is kind of ironic.

NanoWar 6y ago

I donated 10$, hope that helps a bit in the long run! Happy switcher from WhatsApp, dragging all family members with me ;)

frakkingcylons 6y ago

Happy user for the last three years, donated $20

Daniel_sk 6y ago

"We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience." https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464

Daniel_sk 6y ago
"We are making progress towards getting the service back online. Privacy is our top priority, but adding capacity is a close second right now." https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350185818527211521 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350185818527211521
- baby 6y ago
  can't wait for the post mortem : o really wondering why there's an outage. I assume the SGX stuff quickly became a bottleneck, or the message forwarding server wasn't made to scale out very efficiently. In any case, they should have been able to have a very large queue in front of these components and just have a very slow system, probably something blew up due to the sudden peak of users.
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    My guess: https://twitter.com/NovakDaniel/status/1350471722034745348 https://twitter.com/NovakDaniel/status/1350471722034745348
ibejoeb 6y ago
> Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters Awesome
topkeks 6y ago
Does anyone outside Signal Foundation know how's their architecture? There are a lot of references to AWS, GCP, and Azure in the source code hosted in GitHub so they probably use them all in one way or another. It would be super interesting know more details about the infrastructure.

foobandit 6y ago

I suspect this is related to all of the people getting kicked off of other social media platforms. Signal may be becoming the platform of choice for the far-right to share disinformation and organize.

Steltek 6y ago
I believe it's more to do with users abandoning WhatsApp due to the concerning privacy policy that Apple forced them to disclose to their users. Many high profile influencers are recommending people switch to Signal.
DataSceince123 6y ago
yes, this is why we need to get signal banned
crocodiletears 6y ago
Oh no. Better remove it from the app stores, and restrict the impressions of posts that make mention of it on other social media platforms.

bilal4hmed 6y ago

Just saw this on Reddit, another easy to way to increase donations For AMEX Platinum cardholders there’s a promotion for a $30 credit per month for things paid via PayPal, make AMEX donate

frEdmbx 6y ago

As long as we tolerate the world reserve fiat global enslavement system, everything that can be corrupted will be corrupted.

may4m 6y ago

I use huawei p20 lite 2019 and the signal app is not as smooth and fluid as whatsapp. The animations frames are noticeable. I really want to love the app. I hope they improve the android experience for lower end smart phones

kypro 6y ago

My friends have been switching to signal this last week and I'm really happy I made the switch so far. I just wish it was as easy to switch from Amazon and Google.

dan_linder 6y ago

I just donated to let them know I'm interested in their continued existence. I feel bad - my wife and I have been a user of Signal 100% for the past 4+ years and we wouldn't want to use anything else. For some Signal related education, listen to the Security Now! podcast from 2016 - Steve Gibson dives into the protocol underlying Signal, "Open Whisper Systems".

faitswulff 6y ago
Us too. Did you happen to switch over after the election? Assuming you’re American, sorry if that’s not the case!

Niten 6y ago

Is there any data on how many of these new users are WhatsApp refugees vs. Parler refugeees vs. some other category? In principle it shouldn't matter. But I'm worried userbase demographics will determine from which quarter the next legislative threat to end-to-end encryption emerges.

fallingfrog 6y ago

Yeah, I’ll bet they are

458aperta 6y ago

This is a good sign. Thanks to Zuckerberg's mistake, Signal reaps all the rewards. What can we learn from this? Just because you own a platform doesn't mean you have an economic moat. The crowd's sentiment can change overnight and I think Zuck is honestly out of touch with public sentiments. He probably thinks that he can run for US presidency using Facebook as a launchpad but all the money in the world won't fix myopia.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
They do have a massive moat. It's just that if you keep piling up shit, your moat, no matter how deep, will eventually fill up and your users might escape.

mlaretallack 6y ago

We need a Open Inferstructure Foundation...

GRBurst 6y ago

I'm using Signal from the early days on where a lot of stuff wasn't working properly. I try to comvince people for quite some time now and whenever there was like a privacy issue on WhatsApp or other messaging apps, I saw people discovering and moving to Signal. Sadly, whenever there was such an opportunities to shine, they ran into technical difficulties. As a result, many friends tell me on a different messaging app like telegram that they finally tried out signal but moved on because it wasn't working. This makes me very sad and I hope that the Signal team is able to learn from that and plan ahead. @Signal please take your opportunities and make a reminder like a big banner in your office reminding you to ask yourself "is there an opportunity?" Or more concrete "did WhatsApp messed up with privacy?" For me, I will still try to convince more people to switch to signal :-)

GRBurst 6y ago
I'd suggest that: Whenever we, the hacker news guys who care for privacy, recognize that there is an opportunity for a privacy concerned development team like Signal -> We send them an e-mail or similar. Since often its really difficult to spot it yourself.

eins1234 6y ago

One thing on my wishlist for Signal that's curiously still missing is the lack of a Web app. On desktop at least, I'm generally of the position that messaging apps should need no capability outside of what's available in my browser (i.e. sending notifications), so when the option is available that's the one I tend to go for (usually have my commonly used ones sitting around in a pinned tab). Pretty much every chat app out there today (including WhatsApp) has a web app. Anyone know why Signal doesn't? Is it just a prioritization/lack of resources thing?

InvertedRhodium 6y ago
Signal has a desktop application that works across all platforms. Not sure why it isn't a web application though.
UFOFlyer 6y ago
IIRC Signal doesn't have a web app for security reasons. With a iOS/Android/Desktop app, you can verify the checksum of the binary against what signal provides. But with a web app you redownload the application everytime which means you'd have to recheck that checksum every time you use the app. I guess that WhatsApp, Discord, et al have decided that this is a reasonable risk. But the privacy oriented Signal team disagrees. I don't think it's a prioritization issue, the desktop app is currently running via electron which means it's effectively a web app already.
- sneak 6y ago
  No, you can't verify the checksum; it downloads and runs new code without asking. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4578 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4578
  - eins1234 6y ago
    Wow... I was totally convinced by the security argument until I read through this thread, which completely obsoletes that premise. It's no different from a PWA (like WhatsApp) in its update behavior then.

mancerayder 6y ago

A signal of its own success.

smm11 6y ago

Golly, I just wonder what might be going on when thousands are flocking to encrypted channels like Signal daily.

jeena 6y ago

Interesting, so we're replacing a bad centralized app with a good one instead of a decentralized system like https://matrix.org https://matrix.org

tonymet 6y ago

does signal support direct p2p connections (once the conn is negotiated). I'm guessing some users have uPnP / open socket.

Aeolun 6y ago

How does this happen? You can kind of see your usage quickly run to 100% right? I’d think this is one of those moments that someone is permanently observing the usage to increase capacity when necessary. Also, why can’t I send a message any time, instead of just sometimes?

nimbius 6y ago

I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage. for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture. Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting. Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006. - Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement? - Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios? - Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week? It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture. Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS. A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back. Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.

whymarrh 6y ago
I don’t understand, so what? They’re doing their best and if users go somewhere else so be it. I’m sure if they could avoid the outage they would. They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.

perryizgr8 6y ago

What's the endgame with Signal? It is identical to whatsapp in how it works and what features it has/lacks. Whatsapp has big daddy FB to pay the bills (which would be massive for such an app). I doubt Signal can survive on donations from a few privacy conscious users. For a free service, intended to survive with very small amounts of donated money, you need a fundamentally different architecture. Whatsapp was not built for this, and since Signal copied them, neither is Signal. Even if Signal is able to survive on meagre donations, I would think it is a better use of that money to be spent on resilient, distributed architecture than AWS bills. A good architecture ensures sustainability, a large AWS bill just makes Bezos richer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwitaway1235 6y ago

Due to the timing of this outage, nobody really thinks it's a random technical problem or lack of funding, right? Did the United States attack Signal to further clamp down on speech and private communication?

Ansil849 6y ago

I'm a fan and daily user of Signal, but here is the harsh reality that this outage (going on for more than half a day now) exposes: Signal is not, today, suitable as a primary secure communication channel. Maybe one day when it scales, but not today. Countless critical conversations were disrupted today.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Signal has critically failed two times in the past year: now, and almost a year ago when they were forcing everyone to create a PIN (and subject their data to their weird SGX-based cloud storage thing) despite users yelling at them how bad of an idea this is. If you didn't want to do it, you were locked out. That one pissed me off a lot more than today's outage, which is understandable, hopefully short, and unlikely to be repeated once they get scaling under control. It's also the reason why I'm not donating today.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

Just realized: Shouldn't actual message delivery be easily shardable in Signal, since the server side doesn't know the sender, i.e. you can put each user on a different shard without having much issues with cross-shard communication?

superdisk 6y ago

I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst time to have this happen :/ Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.

vander_elst 6y ago
I also would have expected a better communication of the outage at least a bit more regularly (at least 1h since it seems to be an extremely large outage). Additionally, the status page, IMO, lacks of some information e.g. what services are up, historical view etc. Anyway, thrilled to see how it will change after this incident. In the meantime, best of luck to the signal sre team.
suyash 6y ago
give them 24-48 hours, it's a small team and they got a massive surge
leipert 6y ago
FWIW I sent messages earlier without a problem. Judging from their jobs page they are just hiring in US time zones, so it’s understandable that they might run out of steam after an incident going on into the middle of the night. HugOps! Hope they get it fully running soon. Maybe they’ll provide a good, public root cause analysis and I hope that they rethink hiring in order to get more TZ coverage.
mike_d 6y ago
> They're running on AWS The client entry point (api.directory.signal.org) seems to be pointing exclusively to Azure and IBM Cloud depending on geography. It looks like just DNS, the website, and maybe some backend stuff are on AWS. > should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops Who exactly is going to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud spend you propose they turn up?

jbverschoor 6y ago

Whatsapp never had issues running their erlang platform..

zakki 6y ago

I can send and receive messages now

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

It's very poor on anyone to be so toxic about free, valued services and then at first fail jump to public media to scream outrage. Signal is going to be better than ever by going through these moments and improving the platform. I don't mind the inconvenience and don't expect premium quality with five nines of availability. I'm not in a position to complain.

techmememe 6y ago

You can still use the old version called Silence.im, it was not behind a central server, used MMS to exchange private keys.

sillycube 6y ago

Are there many new US users using Signal now?

theloneshark 6y ago

I glanced through very interesting discussions below(sorry, if this is repeated question) I was wondering if it is time to define basic rights of an individual in the internet. - Free & fair access to information(not controlled by any corporation) for everyone [wikipedia?] - Free communication (emails, messaging, calls) for everyone [signal?] How do we structure this? Donations(private individuals, users, governments?), usage fees(annual subscriptions for a household?) or some other payment model we haven't discovered yet (like USPS stamps/postage fee - PAYG)