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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.
well it is a good thing. in capitalism because capitalism doesnt work without it lol
just working together would be much more efficient, i really dont get how this straigth up lie was just accepted like this
You are right that competition in capitalism is a good thing. Yeah you win i guess, sorry for lying.
Yeah you win i guess, sorry for lying.
um wat? i was agreeing with you 😅 i ment this lie about "capitalism works better then X because of the competition" / "competition is needed for innovation" or similar
Uhh yeah i totally knew that... I thought you were accusing me of saying competition is bad under capitalism.
The competition is Azure
This message brought to you by capitalism.
It's no different than an industry self regulating and then miraculously never finding anything wrong doing.
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.
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
The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
https://bsky.app/profile/meredithmeredith.bsky.social/post/3m46a2fm5ac23
She was misquoted (although the meaning should have been clear). This isn't just "cloud" and bears no resemblance to a web server you spun up at home. This sort of world spanning tech stack is not something any company can build themselves, and there are only 3 or 4 companies that could host Signal.
The world's Internet infrastructure basically supports civilization as we know it, and it's crazy to allow it to be privately owned with so little competition.
In the old days, there would be public standards and interoperability and networks of organizations working together. Now the Internet is a series of proprietary walled gardens.
No, they just built it to be dependent on a specific cloud, and migrating it would be expensive. Due to bad decisions
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.
XMPP/Jabber is so much better, hosted on some random guys server in his parents basement
I'm going to call bullshit. There are several decentralized storage networks and resource allocation networks over blockchains.
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
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?
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
198 points (98.5% liked)
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