now just a minute i was told capitalism breeds competition
The competition of who can fuck over everyone else the fastest.
It was also capitalism that told us competition is supposed to be a good thing.
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You are right that competition in capitalism is a good thing. Yeah you win i guess, sorry for lying.
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Uhh yeah i totally knew that… I thought you were accusing me of saying competition is bad under capitalism.
The competition is Azure
Yes because it’s so much better when it’s the government who has the monopole.
The only counter example that comes to mind is EDF in France but other than that it doesn’t change the problem.
This message brought to you by capitalism.
It’s no different than an industry self regulating and then miraculously never finding anything wrong doing.
The article says; if they self host it will cost them billions of dollars.
But I don’t believe that at all. In fact, self hosting can be much cheaper on the long run.
This is the reason Bluesky apparently can scale so well, they use their own infra. Hack, I’m now sending this message from my own infra
It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.
So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.
AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.
However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.
Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.
Isn’t Bluesky for-profit and Signal non-profit?
Signal Foundation is indeed non profit… That being said OpenAI used to be non profit as well hahaha. And yes Bluesky is for-profit, just like X, Facebook etc.
The issue, especially with real-time communications, is that you need infrastructure in global positions. They need to be close to people, they need to have high bandwidth. These are things that are really complicated both financially and legally. You have to have legal representatives in all kinds of countries, so it is much more than just the infrastructure, which is the servers and the data centers and that is why AWS and other cloud providers do make a lot of sense for small or low revenue companies.
Self-hosting really makes sense when you’re very small or very large but the intermediate position does make a lot of sense to use cloud providers and that is why this model did succeed.
There are tons of alternative cloud providers to aws…
Yeah, for example Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud. They operate on a global scale too
I was thinking of non-US companies. But yes.
Something like Alibaba or tencent cloud
There is - federation.
Or distributed serverless P2P communication (like SimpleX does). Specially when it comes to an app that is just meant for person-to-person communications to begin with.
SimpleX have message relay servers that are required for the sytem to function. It’s not “serverless P2P”.
You can run your own signal server and federate it with others, you just can’t on the standard app you get from the app store that just talks to the central signal server.
It’s all open source though so you’d just need to flip some conf flags and compile it yourself.
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Which government? I don’t want the US to do it anymore.
In a federated infrastructure, the answer is “any or all governments”
Tax dollars support devs who submit PRs and hosting server instances
Would be nice if the EU ran free matrix servers for their citizens.
Germany already runs mastodon for their government ministries.
For þem and þeir architecture, probably. Þat says more about þe quality of þeir systems design, þan anyþing else.
Am I having a stroke ?
Why is your text like this? I can barely read anything
Change that letter for “th”.
They are using the thorn character from old English
XMPP/Jabber is so much better, hosted on some random guys server in his parents basement
Bullshit. I can set up an XMMP server that is encrypted and doesn’t rely on AWS.
Does it allow low latency HD encrypted video calls across the globe?
It doesn’t rely on Amazon not fucking up DNS traffic, and I control it because it’s my hardware.
Every Signal video call I have ever been a part of has had shit for both audio and video quality. It’s not a hardware issue because everyone involved has flagship model phones.
Signal has it’s use as an encrypted text message alternative.
OK, cool. So the answer is no then? you didn’t really answer.
At some point you are relying on someone not fucking up something somewhere. At the very least you need your ISP not fucking up your connection speed or something similar.
I’m not saying that xmpp sucks or that they are right on saying that there are not alternatives (although I am inclined to agree). What I’m saying is that your server is not a reference point to compare against, because you operate at immensely different scales and requirements
Yes: https://prosody.im/doc/turn
Further notes on implementing calling with XMPP: https://gist.github.com/iNPUTmice/a28c438d9bbf3f4a3d4c663ffaa224d9
…seems like things may have stagnated around group calling; for now probably need to consider something more video conferencing specific like jitsi or bigbluebutton.
Have you actually tried this?
Hybrid multi cloud is what every mature org moves too…
Like eventually you just cant justify being on only one cloud (businesses, cost and administrative risks), and if you have a consistent enough usage scaling into the cloud for the baseline is just an unjustifiable expense
