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It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• donkeyd 5y ago
  It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.
  • XorNot 5y ago
    Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor. Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons). Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.
    • circularfoyers 5y ago
      Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps. If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.
      • blitzar 5y ago
        > are what are holding them back No, integrating a get rich quick for the founders shit coin into their app is what is holding them back.
      • XorNot 5y ago
        I don't really see how the demands of the core product - E2EE messaging to customers - can be compromised by accepting payment for one of the core problems of E2EE when legal entities are involved: establishing trust. Signal aren't allowing accounts not tied to phone numbers because it currently serves a very useful spam mitigation problem for them. There's no real alternative there that's going to solve it without more work on the business side. Technically the phone number requirement right now means they do charge for "named" accounts, they just don't get paid for them - the phone providers do, since in many countries even prepaid phones require proof of identity to activate.
  • AYkALxknJh 5y ago
    This is exactly right. lol. Its funny, take a step back and you'll see this thread is everyone complaining that a messaging app that's free had an outage and the company acknowledged there was an issue and they are working on it, but took 2 hours to do it. A free app that as you pointed out is run on donations. And the same people would also complain about alternative apps finding ways to monetize while still offering the service for free and keeping it reliable. How spoiled are we? :)
    • a-dub 5y ago
      it's quite funny when you think about how many commercial internet services that were originally offered to the public for free, usually to cross-promote or grow some other business (advertising, mostly, it seems), that now, as the internet has subsumed more basic functions in society, are basically as vital as a telephone was 30+ years ago. like, imagine if gmail announced they were shutting down...
      • blitzar 5y ago
        > imagine if gmail announced they were shutting down... but its free so you cant complain /s
    • tombert 5y ago
      > veryone complaining that a messaging app that's free had an outage and the company acknowledged there was an issue and they are working on it, but took 2 hours to do it. If we want people to switch from Whatsapp to Signal, "it's free lol" really isn't a response. From an end-user perspective, Whatsapp is free too [1], and generally wouldn't have issues with downtime. The fact is that to many people, Signal is the "new" thing, and any friction getting started with it is likely to make some people say "fuck this, I'm going back to Whatsapp." This isn't a project by some random dev on Github that suddenly blew up, Signal has a foundation and millions of users, and if I'm going to convince my parents to use it, the sales pitch cannot be "it's like Whatsapp but doesn't work all the time, but hey it's got freedom or something". [1] I know about data harvesting and whatnot, I'm talking nominally.
  • MrDresden 5y ago
    > "It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations." Completely agree with this point. Unless you are paying for the service (by being the product or via donations) you have no particular right to get upset with the creators of said service. > "What do you expect?" Professionalism and an understanding of the impact this will have on Signal's users. Some will be cut off from necessary communication channels while others might literally have their life depended on the service working. This very delayed response from Signal, coupled with some of the stranger behaviour of the last year and inability to host my own servers is really pushing me towards looking at Matrix as an alternative. And for the record, I've donated to Signal for the last 3 years.
    • donkeyd 5y ago
      > others might literally have their life depended on the service working If your life literally depends on a service, make sure to pay for that service. Also, make sure to have a backup.
      • einpoklum 5y ago
        Many services your life depends on can't be paid for, or rather - you can't decide whether and how much you pay for them, and thus cannot increase their reliability through payment. One set of examples is online services and apps like Facebook, GMail, WhatsApp and such (although you could argue whether your life actually depends on any of these). Another set of examples are things like transportation infrastructure, fire-fighting services, etc.
        • donkeyd 5y ago
          Fun facts: - I pay for mail service from Google. - I don't depend on whatsapp. I have multiple alternatives, including SMS. - I still have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that I never actually use. - I have multiple fire extinguishers, because I don't depend on fire fighters to arrive on time, they're a last resort. My biggest dependency, by far, is the power grid. I really need to look into battery storage for my solar. Because my life literally depends on that... Ooh. And the supply chain for groceries I guess.
  • everfree 5y ago
    Are there any good paid alternatives to Signal? Looking for: Good UI, E2E, shared source native phone and desktop apps, group support, reliable push, easy setup. It seems to me that all the alternatives are either free and suffer from some of the same issues Signal does, or don't have all these features.
    • hirako2000 5y ago
      Element on the Matrix protocol. Not perfect UX but keeps improving. Free but it has a solid business model servicing business cases with the open source set stack that suits corporate needs.
      • fsflover 5y ago
        And you can host it yourself.
      • everfree 5y ago
        Last time I tried Matrix the message delivery was unreliable and E2E was a second class citizen with some big compromises. Has it gotten any better?
        • Arathorn 5y ago
          We’ve never had message delivery problems on Matrix (unless I missed something), and E2EE has been turned on by default since early 2020. You may have been on an overloaded server, or trying years ago.
          • everfree 5y ago
            It was a couple years ago, before 2020. Back then, I had an issue with delayed push notifications. I'll give it another try.
            • hirako2000 5y ago
              Delayed or even skipped notifications is still a thing. But a lead from matrix posted recently on another thread that these bugs have become a priority for their team. One can expect the bugs to be tackled as we go along.
  • 0x000000001 5y ago
    If Signal wants to play with the big boys they need to run their service with the same reliability. We can't go around telling everyone "use Signal, it's important for your privacy" if they have major outages as people will stop using it
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I a world were public service outages can take days to get an official announcement, I think 3 hours for a free non essential service is damn fast.
• m1keil 5y ago
  Why are you so frustrated? It clearly had issues, how would faster acknowledgment would make your day better? With limited resources I rather engineers to just fix the problem instead of spending time trying to give timely status updates.
  • Aachen 5y ago
    Apps often don't work for me. Spotify often needs restarting before it realizes it does have Internet, Antennapod keeps asking if I want to make an exception and use mobile data for a download (I'm on WiFi), etc. An outage confirmation is nice to have before I debug things on my end or ask other people to check things, so I can understand the frustration to an extent (even if it seems overblown). But it doesn't need to be a tweet for me. These people need sleep and/or could be spending their time on fixing the problem like you say, so just get a status page right? Everybody happy. (Just not one of those political ones like Amazon and co have, showing greens until someone hits the outage button manually.)
• flerchin 5y ago
  When I compare to Slack, Teams, or even some AWS outages, it's about industry standard.