Post by @pixelschubsi@troet.cafe
Signal registration without a phone number now available in Android beta 🎉
Read everything about "Signal Login", including screenshots:
👉 https://aboutsignal.com/news/signal-registration-without-a-phone-number-now-available/
#signal #signalapp #signalmessenger #aboutsignal #android #tech #news #signallogin
@aboutsignal why is it 30% more expensive when paying with EUR than USD? Is it because Europeans are more privacy sensitive, so it's more likely you can extort this amount from them?
This also makes the claim of spam prevention implausible: Spammers will just change their locale to be in the US to pay less.
@aboutsignal
It's funny though how things go in circles: Originally, Signal was a paid app, but nobody wanted to pay, so they made the app free and used public funding to grow a significant user base. Now that they have this large amount of users, they can move to be paid again, because users are forced to use their walled garden just like they're forced to use WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord (depending on location and communities).
While I agree that XMPP and/or Matrix is a great idea, I also think Signal is great.
We have gotten very used to, in the last 20 or so years, that "everything must be free". And that is also one of the reasons we have shit platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others; where the users and their data, is actually the price.
When we did "Shareware" in the 80s and 90s, there were similar problems.
Just my two cents.
@joho @aboutsignal I don't think all people say "everything must be free". As long as 1 in 100 doesn't think that it pays for the others, it's not an issue. The economics for instant messaging are that hosting cost per user are extremely cheap (less than 5ct/year) that's why it's enough if 1 in 100 users donates 10€ a year to cover the server cost plus 5€ for the humans involved. With a userbase of the size of Signal, that easily pays dozens of developers and admins.
I think a lot of (too many) people are reluctant to pay for a lot of things Internet.
The point (for me) isn't that "someone can pay for someone else". It's that I'd happily pay for a service I consider to be of value for me as long as the price is within my budget and the service lives up to a basic foundation of privacy, integrity, data protection, etc.
This includes open source stuff too, to which I have either donated funds, or contributed code in many cases.
@joho @pixelschubsi @aboutsignal i agree, but to me it doesn't validate being sneaky or planning on benefiting from a degree of entrapment
both are bad: not supporting free things i.e. with donations, and being tricky
however i think at least with supporting free things, there is a line where ur usage of something+it's scale excuses not supporting. For example i have tried learning blender and pretty well failed where i would moreso donate to it if i had continued use. A factor is that Blender is at such a scale of support that im not inclined to donate out of ethic, like if i think it helps keep something i value going.
Culturally "pay what its worth" is going extinct and it's not good. The value of the dollar is increasingly complex and weird to pin, and large reach/the internet nuke money as a "side effect of supporting what you value" and replace it with "spend only what u feel u have to". Producers charge what they choose and do so arbitrarily. So a consumer doesn't view things that way. It's unfortunate, but the reaction shouldn't be to stray further and im glad for many leaders and projects of free software they don't choose that way. Education on this and encouraging payment for genuinely free stuff as a good thing to do with ur money. If progressive governments were not so neoliberal, i think they'd do charity-like tax concessions to encourage it.
@joho @pixelschubsi @aboutsignal
A monster differance with Sigal and XMPP that people in the Fediverse SHOULD like is that XMPP is decentrized...hosted by 1,000's of independent servers.
I just dont understand why that is lost on folks in the fediverse....
@bob@bots.mpaq.org @joho@mastodon.online @pixelschubsi@troet.cafe @aboutsignal@mastodon.social Signal actively harassed federated forks into shutting down. So they are a no go for me.
@nigel @joho @pixelschubsi @aboutsignal thank you, another reson not to use a system that trains yet another AI on you AND is controlled by ONE org.
Ive been running XMPP servers for YEARS as far back as it was called Jabber. Then you have coders trying to reinvent the wheel like Matrix