9 ms·

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 o

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
    Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than Signal does. "It's fun and the people I care about talking to already use it" is a compelling value proposition, not a frivolous one, given people's everyday needs. The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.
    - mlindner 6y ago
      Why are there so many Telegram fanboys astroturfing in this thread? This thread has nothing to do with Telegram.
    - didibus 6y ago
      I'm a little confused because you brought up Telegram specifically. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram. In fact, I think WhastApp is more secure since it does E2E encryption by default. It's true that Telegram is about "fun" and not security. I just wasn't sure if you tried to imply Telegram is like Signal with a focus on fun as well, or you just meant most people don't care about security and would rather have fun chats?
      - m12k 6y ago
        Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) which puts it ahead of Facebook Messenger. Unlike FB Messenger and WhatsApp, the company behind Telegram so far doesn't have a history of selling your personal data. I'd say it's fairly competitive, though obviously not ahead of Signal
        eitland 6y ago
        > Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) WhatsApp, for all its faults is E2E-encrypted by default and all the time. Not that it helps much unless you avoid activating backups and convince all your contacts to avoid backups. I don't like WhatsApp (anymore), but we should stick to the facts.
  - teekert 6y ago
    Actually all the non switchers now see that there are really a lot of switchers. It's even on mainstream news websites here. I see this as a win.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
    Loved ones. Especially seniors. Are the easiest to convince You carrot them with a unique way to ping you, over tech no one else has, and they see it like an intimate connection with you I had my elder parents and SO use it for years before friends i consider privacy aware and tech savvy... For years Added benefit: its a lot harder to share memes over a young network with no traffic. I guess that may change now....
    - charsi 6y ago
      Never looked at it this way but 100% true in my case. Got my parents on Signal three years ago and they have been perfectly happy.
  - mycall 6y ago
    Did you try to tell them "Ten years from now, your future you might care", as this is really what privacy is about.
- eitland 6y ago
  One of those annoying Telegram users here. I too wish Signal engineers good luck! (Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
  - didibus 6y ago
    Telegram is not a secure chat application though. It's more similar to Facebook Messenger. You're better off using WhatsApp over it if you care about security. Or obviously Signal. When it comes to Matrix, it's a little trickier. Riot, the most common Matrix client does E2E encryption on DMs and invite only rooms. What I'm not sure is what happens if you send a private message to someone who is using Matrix client that doesn't do E2E. Will it fail to send? Or will it like fallback to not encrypted?
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      It will be sent encrypted, and the receiver will only be able to view it if they are on an encryption-capable Matrix client.
    - eitland 6y ago
      > Telegram is not a secure chat application though. Fun fact: I didn't even write that. The rest is not so much for you personally as for a number Signal fans: I get it, I get it: Signal is best. But seriously: do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation? Do you have to take a jab at every other messenger at every given opportunity? Or can we agree that there's room for more than one solution? Because physical mail, email, irc, Telegram etc are probably going to stay around for a long time, at least until Signal solves: - large groups - backups - grows a stable messaging API - creates a Bot api - and starts teleporting physical goods - etc Until Signal solves all this we are going to have to deal with other mesaging solutions. Deal with it. Seriously. Yes: Signal is probably the most secure now IMO. No: talking down other messengers doesn't make it better. @dang: apologies in advance. I've tried hard to keep it polite.
entropea 6y ago
I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signal-apps-big-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signa... > The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm. > “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.” As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Hey, who let the Signal devs write their backend in Ruby on Rails? :-p
    - vinay_ys 6y ago
      Where can I read about the signal server-side architecture? Is it open-source as well?
      - HugoDF 6y ago
        The server is open source https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server Java/DropWizard app
joseph_grobbles 6y ago
πr²
- rakoo 6y ago
  You're not stuck in the traffic jam, you are the traffic jam
- erikbye 6y ago
  I think Elon moved more users than the user you quoted. EDIT: We know it was a joke. Maybe you are downvoted because of your username.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
KMag 6y ago
I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks. Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  I'm a new Signal user myself (maybe six weeks or so). In the past week there's been a huge influx of my contacts joining Signal. I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
  - KMag 6y ago
    Is SMS still popular in your part of the world? I literally haven't gotten an SMS from a human in the past 9 years. Here in Hong Kong, SMS is how your bank sends notifications, and for spam. The chat space is vastly dominated by Weixin/WeChat and WhatsApp.
    - macintux 6y ago
      In the U.S. I’ve never had anyone suggest messaging other than SMS, FB, or (long ago) Twitter.
    - hnrodey 6y ago
      United States. I'm 37. 99.9% of messaging (for me) occurs via iMessages or SMS. FB Messenger is occasionally used for people who are more acquaintances (don't have their phone number). I don't really have a good reason to not use iMessages (blue bubbles). Reasonably secure and Just Works. SMS on the other hand.... my least favorite part of SMS (besides the complete lack of security) is that media messages are crippled in quality. Photos and videos are compressed and distorted beyond belief.
bitcharmer 6y ago
Yup, and it's not like Signal should be surprised with it. The influx has been happening for a while now and it seems like they were incapable of handling it. I have no idea how I'm going to defend them against all my family members I somehow managed to convert from WhatsApp to stay on this platform.
- tamiral 6y ago
  It’s an FOSS teaM working around the clock to support... let’s not be mean I’m sure they are doing all they can to get this resolved
  - meibo 6y ago
    It's only FOSS by appearance really - it's still a team of well-paid engineers that operate like any other startup, with the difference that you can read the code of their apps and the bug-tracker is public. They operate on their own schedules and priorities, and it's tricky to get your PR into any of the clients.
    - windthrown 6y ago
      Well paid, but not lavishly paid by Silicon Valley standards. Salaries listed in their IRS form 990 have the CEO making ~$200k and other engineers in the ~$120k-$180k range. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Whatever reasonable excuses the signal team has are completely irrelevant from the perspective of casual users.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 6y ago
  I'm not sure a 5x+ growth in under a week is really "for a while now". If anything I'm surprised they've kept it together this long. The growth looks more like an exponential function too, so that's even more difficult. Good luck Signal team!
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Same here! Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."
lerax 6y ago
You should considered Telegram instead.
- chopin24 6y ago
  Telegram is insecure and also being swamped with right wingers. Doesn’t seem promising.
  - rvz 6y ago
    > also being swamped with right wingers So is Signal. 'right wingers' are everywhere.
    - chopin24 6y ago
      Right. But one of these is secure and the other isn’t. State action against telegram is eminent.
      - rvz 6y ago
        These users who are coming from these platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram) don't care about that. If Signal is still unable to stay online then the users will leave and they will try the second best option. (Even if it is less secure). This has now become a usability and reliability issue for Signal.
    - frEdmbx 6y ago
      We had better hope that those who are silenced always have some sort of forum to go to, lest violence become inevitable. It's almost as if that's what the fascistic censors want. Eventually, those who aren't considered desirable will seek out decentralized, permissionless, alternatives. Kind of like how 99.999999% of crime is funded by FRN cash, rather than AMEX. The censorship will lead to permissionless, anti-fragile, forums.
    - kbelder 6y ago
      Yeah; almost half the users are right of center.
spurgu 6y ago
Yeah I've been grinding my teeth thinking about exactly this all day. :(
arendtio 6y ago
I read the message differently. It looks like there have been so many people wanting to switch, that Signal was overwhelmed by the new demand. I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.
m-p-3 6y ago
They managed to jump from 10M installs to 50M in a matter of days, and that's just on Android.
rex_lupi 6y ago
Thousands of people are joining Signal after hearing about the Whatsapp privacy policy changes, but the irony is that a significant portion of these people (if not the majority) still use Facebook, upload photos and stuff, chat on messenger, with that app, installed on their phones alongside Signal. Most people don't actually realize why should they be worried about corporations collecting their data. I wonder what fraction of these people will stick to Signal. Signal is adding new servers, lets hope they dont need to retire these in the coming days.
C19is20 6y ago
It's great! Everyone I 'converted' is now thinking about the implications - from many different angles. Any outage for a few weeks is a win for humans and a huuuuge kick in the nuts for the twats.
KirillPanov 6y ago
> This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. Please stop moving people to centralized services.
- erezsh 6y ago
  If only decentralized services worked as well as centralized ones..
  - topranks 6y ago
    Yeah it kinda pisses me off constantly reading about how decentralised messaging, or ad-hoc wireless mesh networks, or whatever it is, is the way to go. That shit works on a small scale. Serving the entire planet needs hierarchy and co-ordination. Doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be completely centralised, but some of the woolly wishful thinking you come across is not based in the real world.
brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
I agree. This happened with Pokemon GO, at launch, but the reasoning is the same: "we didn't think there'd be that many users." Took almost a month to become stable. Hopefully Open Whisper Systems will get on it faster (I have confidence, for whatever that's worth).
holografix 6y ago
Same here I had a group of about 15 ex colleagues I keep in touch with and managed quite easily to convince all of them to get Signal about 2 weeks ago. They’re all back chatting on Facebook and some are claiming that WhatsApp won’t be sharing data because of some European court case. AKA rationalising their negligent behaviour with regards to their private data. These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.
volongoto 6y ago
Same here. I moved a lot of my contacts and several groups over to Signal. And this happened. I'm fine with the down time, I don't have any urgent communication needs and if I did, there are other ways to contact people (SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.). But I feel like I owe these people an explanation about this. An explanation where I say, "Hey look, there are no guarantees this won't happen in the future, but should still stick to this one". I'm not very good at writing and hoping to find something that I can use :)

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
  Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than Signal does. "It's fun and the people I care about talking to already use it" is a compelling value proposition, not a frivolous one, given people's everyday needs. The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Why are there so many Telegram fanboys astroturfing in this thread? This thread has nothing to do with Telegram.
  - didibus 6y ago
    I'm a little confused because you brought up Telegram specifically. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram. In fact, I think WhastApp is more secure since it does E2E encryption by default. It's true that Telegram is about "fun" and not security. I just wasn't sure if you tried to imply Telegram is like Signal with a focus on fun as well, or you just meant most people don't care about security and would rather have fun chats?
    - m12k 6y ago
      Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) which puts it ahead of Facebook Messenger. Unlike FB Messenger and WhatsApp, the company behind Telegram so far doesn't have a history of selling your personal data. I'd say it's fairly competitive, though obviously not ahead of Signal
      - eitland 6y ago
        > Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) WhatsApp, for all its faults is E2E-encrypted by default and all the time. Not that it helps much unless you avoid activating backups and convince all your contacts to avoid backups. I don't like WhatsApp (anymore), but we should stick to the facts.
- teekert 6y ago
  Actually all the non switchers now see that there are really a lot of switchers. It's even on mainstream news websites here. I see this as a win.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Loved ones. Especially seniors. Are the easiest to convince You carrot them with a unique way to ping you, over tech no one else has, and they see it like an intimate connection with you I had my elder parents and SO use it for years before friends i consider privacy aware and tech savvy... For years Added benefit: its a lot harder to share memes over a young network with no traffic. I guess that may change now....
  - charsi 6y ago
    Never looked at it this way but 100% true in my case. Got my parents on Signal three years ago and they have been perfectly happy.
- mycall 6y ago
  Did you try to tell them "Ten years from now, your future you might care", as this is really what privacy is about.
eitland 6y ago
One of those annoying Telegram users here. I too wish Signal engineers good luck! (Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
- didibus 6y ago
  Telegram is not a secure chat application though. It's more similar to Facebook Messenger. You're better off using WhatsApp over it if you care about security. Or obviously Signal. When it comes to Matrix, it's a little trickier. Riot, the most common Matrix client does E2E encryption on DMs and invite only rooms. What I'm not sure is what happens if you send a private message to someone who is using Matrix client that doesn't do E2E. Will it fail to send? Or will it like fallback to not encrypted?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    It will be sent encrypted, and the receiver will only be able to view it if they are on an encryption-capable Matrix client.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > Telegram is not a secure chat application though. Fun fact: I didn't even write that. The rest is not so much for you personally as for a number Signal fans: I get it, I get it: Signal is best. But seriously: do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation? Do you have to take a jab at every other messenger at every given opportunity? Or can we agree that there's room for more than one solution? Because physical mail, email, irc, Telegram etc are probably going to stay around for a long time, at least until Signal solves: - large groups - backups - grows a stable messaging API - creates a Bot api - and starts teleporting physical goods - etc Until Signal solves all this we are going to have to deal with other mesaging solutions. Deal with it. Seriously. Yes: Signal is probably the most secure now IMO. No: talking down other messengers doesn't make it better. @dang: apologies in advance. I've tried hard to keep it polite.

entropea 6y ago

I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.

ceejayoz 6y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signal-apps-big-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signa... > The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm. > “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.” As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
- oblio 6y ago
  Hey, who let the Signal devs write their backend in Ruby on Rails? :-p
  - vinay_ys 6y ago
    Where can I read about the signal server-side architecture? Is it open-source as well?
    - HugoDF 6y ago
      The server is open source https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server Java/DropWizard app

joseph_grobbles 6y ago

πr²

rakoo 6y ago
You're not stuck in the traffic jam, you are the traffic jam
erikbye 6y ago
I think Elon moved more users than the user you quoted. EDIT: We know it was a joke. Maybe you are downvoted because of your username.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

KMag 6y ago

I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks. Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.

hnrodey 6y ago
I'm a new Signal user myself (maybe six weeks or so). In the past week there's been a huge influx of my contacts joining Signal. I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
- KMag 6y ago
  Is SMS still popular in your part of the world? I literally haven't gotten an SMS from a human in the past 9 years. Here in Hong Kong, SMS is how your bank sends notifications, and for spam. The chat space is vastly dominated by Weixin/WeChat and WhatsApp.
  - macintux 6y ago
    In the U.S. I’ve never had anyone suggest messaging other than SMS, FB, or (long ago) Twitter.
  - hnrodey 6y ago
    United States. I'm 37. 99.9% of messaging (for me) occurs via iMessages or SMS. FB Messenger is occasionally used for people who are more acquaintances (don't have their phone number). I don't really have a good reason to not use iMessages (blue bubbles). Reasonably secure and Just Works. SMS on the other hand.... my least favorite part of SMS (besides the complete lack of security) is that media messages are crippled in quality. Photos and videos are compressed and distorted beyond belief.

bitcharmer 6y ago

Yup, and it's not like Signal should be surprised with it. The influx has been happening for a while now and it seems like they were incapable of handling it. I have no idea how I'm going to defend them against all my family members I somehow managed to convert from WhatsApp to stay on this platform.

tamiral 6y ago
It’s an FOSS teaM working around the clock to support... let’s not be mean I’m sure they are doing all they can to get this resolved
- meibo 6y ago
  It's only FOSS by appearance really - it's still a team of well-paid engineers that operate like any other startup, with the difference that you can read the code of their apps and the bug-tracker is public. They operate on their own schedules and priorities, and it's tricky to get your PR into any of the clients.
  - windthrown 6y ago
    Well paid, but not lavishly paid by Silicon Valley standards. Salaries listed in their IRS form 990 have the CEO making ~$200k and other engineers in the ~$120k-$180k range. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- centimeter 6y ago
  Whatever reasonable excuses the signal team has are completely irrelevant from the perspective of casual users.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
godelski 6y ago
I'm not sure a 5x+ growth in under a week is really "for a while now". If anything I'm surprised they've kept it together this long. The growth looks more like an exponential function too, so that's even more difficult. Good luck Signal team!

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Same here! Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."

lerax 6y ago

You should considered Telegram instead.

chopin24 6y ago
Telegram is insecure and also being swamped with right wingers. Doesn’t seem promising.
- rvz 6y ago
  > also being swamped with right wingers So is Signal. 'right wingers' are everywhere.
  - chopin24 6y ago
    Right. But one of these is secure and the other isn’t. State action against telegram is eminent.
    - rvz 6y ago
      These users who are coming from these platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram) don't care about that. If Signal is still unable to stay online then the users will leave and they will try the second best option. (Even if it is less secure). This has now become a usability and reliability issue for Signal.
  - frEdmbx 6y ago
    We had better hope that those who are silenced always have some sort of forum to go to, lest violence become inevitable. It's almost as if that's what the fascistic censors want. Eventually, those who aren't considered desirable will seek out decentralized, permissionless, alternatives. Kind of like how 99.999999% of crime is funded by FRN cash, rather than AMEX. The censorship will lead to permissionless, anti-fragile, forums.
  - kbelder 6y ago
    Yeah; almost half the users are right of center.

spurgu 6y ago

Yeah I've been grinding my teeth thinking about exactly this all day. :(

arendtio 6y ago

I read the message differently. It looks like there have been so many people wanting to switch, that Signal was overwhelmed by the new demand. I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.

m-p-3 6y ago

They managed to jump from 10M installs to 50M in a matter of days, and that's just on Android.

rex_lupi 6y ago

Thousands of people are joining Signal after hearing about the Whatsapp privacy policy changes, but the irony is that a significant portion of these people (if not the majority) still use Facebook, upload photos and stuff, chat on messenger, with that app, installed on their phones alongside Signal. Most people don't actually realize why should they be worried about corporations collecting their data. I wonder what fraction of these people will stick to Signal. Signal is adding new servers, lets hope they dont need to retire these in the coming days.

C19is20 6y ago

It's great! Everyone I 'converted' is now thinking about the implications - from many different angles. Any outage for a few weeks is a win for humans and a huuuuge kick in the nuts for the twats.

KirillPanov 6y ago

> This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. Please stop moving people to centralized services.

erezsh 6y ago
If only decentralized services worked as well as centralized ones..
- topranks 6y ago
  Yeah it kinda pisses me off constantly reading about how decentralised messaging, or ad-hoc wireless mesh networks, or whatever it is, is the way to go. That shit works on a small scale. Serving the entire planet needs hierarchy and co-ordination. Doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be completely centralised, but some of the woolly wishful thinking you come across is not based in the real world.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago

I agree. This happened with Pokemon GO, at launch, but the reasoning is the same: "we didn't think there'd be that many users." Took almost a month to become stable. Hopefully Open Whisper Systems will get on it faster (I have confidence, for whatever that's worth).

holografix 6y ago

Same here I had a group of about 15 ex colleagues I keep in touch with and managed quite easily to convince all of them to get Signal about 2 weeks ago. They’re all back chatting on Facebook and some are claiming that WhatsApp won’t be sharing data because of some European court case. AKA rationalising their negligent behaviour with regards to their private data. These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.

volongoto 6y ago

Same here. I moved a lot of my contacts and several groups over to Signal. And this happened. I'm fine with the down time, I don't have any urgent communication needs and if I did, there are other ways to contact people (SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.). But I feel like I owe these people an explanation about this. An explanation where I say, "Hey look, there are no guarantees this won't happen in the future, but should still stick to this one". I'm not very good at writing and hoping to find something that I can use :)