this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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A more accurate title could be "Privacy is Priceless, but Centralization is Expensive": with the era of cheap money coming to an end, grows a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of some large internet services. Signal is no exception and this emphasises the importance of federated alternatives (XMPP, fediverse, …) for the good health of the future internet.
Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I've seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.
Right? People simply expect someone else to pay the bills.
And why wouldn't they? 90% of the software people use daily is free (as in beer), so of course being told that's going to change is going to cause upset. It takes a lot for people to want to pay money for something that, to those who don't value free (as in freedom) software, is no different than the costless alternative.
At some point society needs to figure out how we can subsidize the costs of data storage, remote servers, and provision of internet to people for free.
The only real way to do that is government subsidized servers, but that will fall in the same category as literally every other government service: right wing political entities try to privatize it and make it as shitty and parasitic as possible.
You pay for these things with your data. If the government is paying for privacy-respecting storage or safe internet access, then so are you with your taxes. I'd vote for that, but I'd guess the majority of people would not.
Self-hosting.
We just need ISPs to allow it.
There's nothing to figure out, if the question is how "society" does it then the answer is literally taxes.
Yup, it has a cost, but there's perhaps a one or two orders of magnitude cost difference between hosting instant messaging + calls with something like XMPP, and hosting mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin (or why I do the former but not the later, and why I'm ok to pay for the service, esp. considering that my instance's business model isn't, unlike Reddit, to re-sell influence and data).
Decentralized messaging is comparatively very cheap (at least in the case of XMPP): it doesn't require nearly as much storage (and what is stored is short-lived considering it's end-to-end encrypted) nor bandwidth (messages are mere bytes, A/V calls are peer-to-peer most of the time), so we are far from what it takes to self-host mastodon and lemmy (with the expectation that any post can be accessed at any time, and content never expires).
Decentralisation would just spread the costs over more individuals. Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities. The total amount people who would have to chip in to make the system sustainable won't change dramatically. Decentralisation isn't some magic wand that makes infrastructure and labor costs disappear into thin air.
...the costs and the risks: let's jump forward a few years into financing issues, at what point does Signal become a liability and start operating against their stated mission, if the alternative is that they cannot survive? We are witnessing enough contemporary examples of enshittification to know that it's a real possibility, and that all centralized providers, but in particular the ones not charging for service, are at risk.
Some would even argue that this has already started in the case of Signal with their crypto payments and blocking of 3rd party clients which are clearly user-hostile.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Running costs get exponential with scale. You can host 1000 users on a shoebox computer/raspberry pi, but delivering a service for millions requires datacenter-level infrastructure and tons of engineering know-how.
Most people into self hosting or having a NAS at home can already accommodate their families, friends and more, which means millions of potential users, without the problem of trust from a single organization
E.g. SMS isn't secure, but it is free as it uses downtime in overhead cell channels.
Except it is not free. My carrier does not include them in the main plans (because they're not as commonplace anymore), and you either buy an additional package or pay per each SMS.
It's free for them
Have any suggestions for "normies" on iPhone and Android that aren't Signal?
SimpleX or any XMPP with OMEMO
Thanks!
+1 for simplex
matrix comes to mind, get element on iOS and Android (Fdroid or play store)
Thanks!
your welcome.
If those "normies" aren't turned away by the creation of an account (and if they can use Amazon, I doubt it's an issue), they can certainly use XMPP :)
Here to pick a provider:
https://providers.xmpp.net/
Here for the software:
https://xmpp.org/software/?platform=android
https://xmpp.org/software/?platform=ios
Thanks!
I surely do!
Try Session or SimpleX or Threema.
Threema is the oldest and most polished option. You do have to buy a license for a one-time fee though. It's entirely worth the play store credit I spent, but if I were to buy now, I'd use their website store so I could use the open source app instead.
@comfydecal
@u_tamtam
Thanks!
I cannot really root for threema here because of its centralized nature, although I do appreciate that it has a saner business model than Signal