Fr. Fuck signal for removing SMS support

Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I've seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.

Decentralisation would just spread the costs over more individuals. Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities. The total amount people who would have to chip in to make the system sustainable won't change dramatically. Decentralisation isn't some magic wand that makes infrastructure and labor costs disappear into thin air.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that to be the bulk of their spending. Maybe they should remove the need for phone numbers now they removed SMS.

Without SMS verification, spam would be so much worse that they've been kind of obliged to keep it, even though it defeats/undoes most of the privacy features they like to advertise about

I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

Wonder no more, they have it in their 2022 tax filing:

Compensation

Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other

Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343

Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557

Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500

Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208

Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668

Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346

Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032

Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104

Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0

from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840

I mean, without browsing levels.fyi or anything like that you can get 4 to 10 software engineers for 1 million (anything from 100k to 250k depending on location, experience, etc.).

Not all employees are engineers but that would imply 80 to 200 staff for the 20 million they state.

That's only the component paid to the actual staff though. There are additional costs like Healthcare, unemployment, social security, etc, and other benefits that may not be included in wages (though some portion may be deducted from salaries), but they are including in that statement / summary.

It's not only salaries:

about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

Even if they federated (which I doubt they will do), someone would have to foot the bill for those servers. Same thing on lemmy, someone's eating the server costs here even if it isn't a major corporation.

Done.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

@MonkderZweite

Signal isn't a federated protocol, so even if they were incentivized to release all the server bits and pieces, it would not help. You could run your own, but wouldn't be able to reach-out to your friends running theirs.

pUt iT oN tHe BlOcKcHaiN bRo!