💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2023-11-16.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:10:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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I'm on the record disliking Signal because of a bunch of reasons, and here's one more.
https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Their number one expense, dwarfing all the others combined, is SMS delivery. The main problem with Signal's resource usage, spend, and privacy is the phone number requirement. It's ostensibly to stop spam, whatever that means, since apparently getting a massive amount of phone numbers is sufficiently difficult.
But hey, I don't really see spam on IRC, and my XMPP account doesn't get any either. Since I'm not on a big provider I do get a few spam emails, but very very few, and email doesn't interrupt my day - I check it when I want. But I do get spam phone calls and texts. Weird.
I think the complexity is in the wrong place. It should be a little harder to sign up, like you have to generage a PGP key or solve a math problem or something? What with all this machine learning it'd be easy to make a computer do that, though, and the one thing a computer can't or won't do is go buy a SIM card at a cell phone store. But hey, with e-sims, this may get easier.
Phone numbers are still Signal's biggest problem, for me, and for them. Usernames when.