Recent commits suggest Signal is preparing a paid subscription for backups.
A private messenger for Android. Contribute to signalapp/Signal-Android development by creating an account on GitHub.
As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.
Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can't run entirely on donations.
Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it's probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Wikipedia has way more donors, since it's basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn't the default choice.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
At least this time they do it out in the open, not like with the MobileCoin integration.
That's a pretty good idea for monetization.
Completely fine with that, I agree
As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.
Its happened too much, I've asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades
It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.
Finally a good approach at raising money (other than donations)
I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn't use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it
If this feature rolls out but you can't pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal). If you can support the project than do it. But if you can't than don't force your self
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
Excellent news honestly. Trying to get people to switch to something encrypted and the one thing I've thought of is that I want to know it can continue indefinitely. Everything else in life costs money- we just never think of it computer wise because we pay with our data and privacy.
This can join threema with a solid revenue stream. I back mine up locally but would pay for this anyhow.
All of my signal conversations have auto expiry
Do people really use their conversation logs for things? Are you often searching your conversational logs?
Outside of corporate compliance issues I can't imagine the workflow for most people
Yes, and yes.
"I said this was happening 3 weeks ago. Here's the literal text of me sending it to you and you saying 'Okay thanks' in reply."
Shuts down an argument real quick.
History search is great when you have a lot of friends and poor memory. Perhaps not your use case ?
I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it's because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it's just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn't there, people might remember something important differently.
Yes and yes
Me and my wife and wife sends information, pictures , whatever. I often search my messages for stuff
Though the same I like my conversations disappear when I need to reinstall Signal.
Yes, and yes. But most of it's because I've moved all communication over to it.
If I have anything that shouldn't stick around it doesn't stick around, If I need my grocery list from last month it's there though.
That said, I really don't have any interest in backups. It's an ephemeral stream at best that is there when I need it. And there are parts of it disappear when they're no longer needed.
The days where we presumed we could safely removed about things to our friends over social media are clearly gone and privacy is of ultimate importance.
Pretend it's 1984, and you won't get yourself in trouble.
out of curiosity: what duration do you have?
My default is set to 1 week.
Enough for conversational context
You are right, I don't really search my messages that much. Most important conversion is going by email for most people still.
Most Whatsapp users (my parents) want to keep logs of everything, its become normalised.
I have never searched for a message ever.
Would pay for
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn't just buying a phone with more space. I'd like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that's gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I'd prolly just redirect my donations to that.
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
honestly thats why I don't like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there's also the security about metadata, but for most people that's probably not a huge concern
I don't mind paying a fair price, for a service, so they should go for it. I use both Signal and Telegram, and I would pay for Telegram too, if the price was more fair...
I commented this in the other thread, sharing it here as well
I’ve been waiting for this feature for a while actually 😅
When I last saw people talking about it, there were rumors that there would be a reasonable free backup (ex. up to 1 Gb) with relatively cheap paid options above that. I scrolled through the GitHub link and couldn’t confirm or deny if this is still/actually the case.
Backups are the #1 pain point for friends that tried to switch to Signal, especially for those on iOS. I have a local backup + sync setup for my own phone, but it’s a lot to expect for the average casual user to set up.
Whatsapp has backups to Google Drive, which is better than nothing but not ideal. It’s time Signal had a reliable backup method for casual users
Good initiative. They need money to work
Cloud backups, for security!
If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.
Year according to a wiki page on the unofficial Signal wiki the backup will not be directly linked to the user "It appears that backups will not be directly linkable to a user. Authentication for operations against a given backup will use zero-knowledge proofs.".
Like cloud backup on their server or a subscription just to export the files to store offline?
I think it's cloud backups.
In the GitHub commit it's called Renew your Signal Backups subscription.
If it's 1 euro a month, I'll do it
Nice. I don't think I need this but its good to have options
Imagine having to pay with it with MobileCoin's shitcoin ^^
Anyone knows about creating easily a signal account without smartphone ? Telegram does that and I have tremondous people that would use that instead of whatsapp/telegram and that don't understand matrix or even Mattermost 😭
Telegram does that? how? you need a phone number, so essentially a smartphone too. or is it common in your community to use feature phones, so that the problem is no registration on PC?
No Telegram can do registration with just a simple text message + pc, no need of smartphones just simple dumb phone
Assuming you have a computer to get on here, you could use an Android emulator like BlueStacks.
@rozlav don’t need a smartphone, but do need access to a telephone number. it’s an important anti spam measure. you never have to use or display it: can operate entirely with signal usernames instead
As long as it's implicit right and is a reasonable price I 100% will be getting it. I am willing to pay someone else to securly hold my (e2ee) data.
As long as local backups don't go away this looks fine.