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.
Nice. I don’t think I need this but its good to have options
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.”.
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.
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
Switching to Molly won’t necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.
I was saying local backup
Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they’ll remove it when they add this.
Maybe lets see what happens
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
Interesting, how do you use syncthing with molly?
Well, if you didn’t know, Molly is a soft fork of the Signal Android client.
But, I think both support making local backups of your chats.
I do so daily and keep two copies. These get synced in real time to my little NAS and/or my PC/LaptopThanks, I do use Molly but never occured to me to use Syncthing to make a local backup copy. Great idea.
Glad to be of help! I personally really like Syncthing, since it makes implementing a resilient decentralised backup strategy quite easy.
Though I would recommend you go with “Syncthing-Fork”, as iirc the “vanilla” app was put into maintenance mode or smth like that
And another good tip - thank you!
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.
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.
History search is great when you have a lot of friends and poor memory. Perhaps not your use case ?
Me and my wife and wife sends information, pictures , whatever. I often search my messages for stuff
Yes and yes
Though the same I like my conversations disappear when I need to reinstall Signal.
out of curiosity: what duration do you have?
My default is set to 1 week.
Enough for conversational context
Most Whatsapp users (my parents) want to keep logs of everything, its become normalised.
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 bitch 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.
My grocery list is its own signal group chat with other members of the household
Same, We do more than groceries though, It’s kind of fun anybody that needs anything just pops it in there
You are right, I don’t really search my messages that much. Most important conversion is going by email for most people still.
I have never searched for a message ever.
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