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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it

While that may or may not be true, it's really not important for several reasons.

All current XMPP clients I have seen are janky as fuck.
No one is going to spend the billions of dollars necessary to advertise XMPP clients to end users who aren't actively looking for them.
The vast majority obviously doesn't care about their privacy.

Just seems like a fruitless endeavour.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

WhatsApp started is an XMPP client, but they use lots of proprietary extensions (doesn't matter since they don't federate). You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.

The open source implementations are developed by like 1-2 guys in their spare time and they're not far behind (and sometimes even ahead) other federated messengers which received tens of millions in venture capital funding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.

What about feature-rich and with a nice UI?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nothing in the XMPP RFCs says you can't do that. Go ahead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

And yet no one does or has in a dozen years...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.