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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 th

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.

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.