XMPP/Jabber is so much better, hosted on some random guys server in his parents basement
There are tons of alternative cloud providers to aws…
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
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
now just a minute i was told capitalism breeds competition
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 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
The competition is Azure
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.
You’re saying a single company can buy and maintain a server infrastructure cheaper than rates like .0001 cent per request? Yeah I don’t quite believe that. An entire industry moved to using AWS because it was cheaper.
AWS sucks for several reasons but let’s not pretend it’s more expensive than self hosting
Have you not been seeing it is in some cases. And companies are going back to on orem because it’s cheaper.
I have not seen that claim until now. I always have been told the entire existence of AWS is because it’s way cheaper than self hosting and that makes sense to me
it completely depends on your use case. like, 100% of the time it depends on your use case. AWS can be cheaper, but it can also be orders of magnitude more expensive. That’s how AWS makes so much fucking money. Because once it’s orders of magnitude more expensive it’s very hard to move off of it. I ran a software stack at my last company completely on AWS Lambda. It was cheaper than if we hosted it ourselves, but not because the infrastructure was cheaper. No, it was more expensive, but because we had to do less maintenance and upkeep. Deploys were easier, rollbacks were easier, etc. If we didn’t care about maintenance, we weren’t deploying numerous times a day, and if our services were used 24/7 rather than only in the middle of the work day, then it would have been much cheaper to host it ourselves on a box in an office.
In SOME cases, it is cheaper than on prem. If you need a lot of compute power occasionally, it can be cheaper. If you actually scale up and down according to the load (which a lot of companies do not do), it might be cheaper. But a large amount of companies don’t fall in those cases or don’t do it efficiently. Some spend in a year the same amount they would have paid for on prem servers they would have kept 5 years or more.
Cloud providers offer other things like multi regional redundancy, which can be hard to achieve for smaller businesses.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and not just downvoting like most others!
It’s never been cheaper. It’s so much easier to scale. It’s never been cheaper. Well, maybe at a very low usage rate. But, at scale, it’s never been cheaper.
Buying server hardware is a lot more difficult and with more lead time than just buying a computer. Plus you then have to build your server infrastructure out in a data center. It takes a lot of time, and specific logistical skills. AWS is far easier to scale your services then doing it yourself, especially if you have extremely high peaks that you have to serve.
If AWS was cheaper then hosting, they wouldn’t make money.
The upfront cost of entering the market getting higher and higher as an industry matures is one of the major reasons why we have incomplete competition and monopolies. If as a scrappy underdog you “just” need to build a network of serverfarms and hire the people to design, manage and run all that so you can just even start to dream about competing with the goliaths that basically have all that built and more then in practice you are not entering that market. That upfront cost is the issue, not the cost of running it in the long run.
It’s not even some malicious plot, it’s just the cost of doing business in a maturing market gets higher as technology advances. All these cloud providers know this upfront cost issue. White it’s easier to start with AWS they will try to keep everybody locked in so they can milk every cent out of their techofeudal peasants living in their fiefdom if they ever make it. If anybody wants to get out they need to cough up the cash to build all that infrastructure while still paying for Amazon to keep them going.
is this really true tho? i mean just recently i saw someone say that hosting on bare metal for example gave them like a 2 or 3 times more performance
so i wonder if, exspecially for bigger companies, if this is really cheaper at all. It sounds less efficient
its cost more money upfront, since companies need to invest money to build their servers/server racks. You can also still rent space in a data-center, without the need of building your own data center.
But on the long run, it can be much cheaper than constantly renting all the hardware. You can compare it to houses, buying a house costs more money then renting. But overall in the long run, you are normally better off buying a property (assuming you can of course… its just an example).
The issue with cloud providers like AWS is that they charge for virtually everything, and that makes it easy to rack up charges if you forget about something you spun up as a test last week and forgot to terminate it. For larger companies it can be a significant issue. So there are other companies out there that you can use to scan your entire AWS account, summarize what you’re using, and highlight things you may not need any more. They’ll also recommend cost savings measures like paying for a year of server time up front instead of paying as you go. If you know you’ll need a server for a year then paying annually is a lot less expensive.
On the plus side, you don’t need to deal with things like hardware failures. We have a large AWS environment where I work, and we’ll occasionally get an email informing us that an instance is “running on degraded hardware”. A simple reboot (power cycle) will move the instance to new hardware. And if you decide you need more RAM, more CPUs etc. then it’s also as simple as rebooting.
Their servers are slow, I have seen that myself, but I don’t see how it wouldn’t be cheaper to use AWS other than maybe some highly specific scenarios.
You have it backwards.
There are some very few specific use case that most companies don’t ever meet that makes AWS cheaper. In the vast majority of use cases it is an order of magnitude more expensive.
It’s about short term vs long term costs, and AWS has priced itself to make it cheaper short term but a bit more expensive long term.
Companies are more focused on the short term - even if something like AWS is more expensive long term, if it saves money in the short term that money can be used for something else.
Also many companies don’t have the money upfront to build out their own infrastructure quickly in the short term, but can afford longer term gradual costs. The hope would be even though it’s more expensive, they reach a scale faster where they make bigger profits and it was worth the extra expense to AWS.
This is how a lot of outsourcing works. And it’s exacerbated by many companies being very short term and stock price focused. Companies could invest in their own infrastructure for long term gain, but they often favour short term profit boosts and cost reduction to boost their share price or pay out to share holders.
Companies frequently so things not in their long term interests for this reason. For example, companies that own their own land and buildings sell them off and rent them back. Short term it gives them a financial boost, long term it’s a permanent cost and loss of assets.
In Signals case it’s less of a choice; it’s funded by donations and just doesn’t have the money to build out it’s own data centre network. Donations will support ongoing gradual and scaling costs, but it’s unlikely they’d ever get a huge tranch of cash to be able to build data centres world wide. They should still be using multiple providers and they should also look to buildup some Infrastructure of their own for resilience and lower long term costs.
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.
when companies become so big and provide essential services they should be taken over by the government
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.
I’m going to call bullshit. There are several decentralized storage networks and resource allocation networks over blockchains.
You don’t need block chain. They just can start to self host, instead of joining aws like every other company.
No sht that we only have 4 large cloud providers, it’s because all there customers are lazy and do not want to self host.
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?
For þem and þeir architecture, probably. Þat says more about þe quality of þeir systems design, þan anyþing else.
Why is your text like this? I can barely read anything
They are using the thorn character from old English
Change that letter for “th”.
Am I having a stroke ?
No. They do this on purpose. They seem to believe it messes with LLM scraping tools.
