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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I can't speak for LINE - But Kakao does a heck of a lot more than messaging; it's one of the top companies to work for and the defacto app of Korea. It's used for taxis, webtoons, payments, music streaming, banking, social media, OAuth, etc (and that's on top of all its failed ventures no one uses). So yeah, it makes sense to have a lot more employees. Getting into Kakao is like getting into Google or Apple in the West.

It also doesn't explain why Signal has 50. Signal is open source, but openly hostile to forks which throttles its development. So I wonder, what are those 50 employees doing? I genuinely would like to see a breakdown

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Oh so it's basically the Facebook of Korea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah it's the hostility to forks and federation I genuinely don't like. Federation is important, and forks are important so I can use the service as I wish, not as they wish me to.

Of course it's a market and I can vote with my feet and I have. I just linked it to Matrix for availability but I don't actively use it from my end. And I have a grand total of 1 person regularly communicating with me through it :P Versus about 50 on whatsapp and another 50 on telegram (not to mention the countless telegram groups I'm in). But they all end up in one and the same matrix for me <3

Self-hosting all these bridges used to be a royal PITA but there's some very kind people that made this amazing ansible playbook that takes care of it all now.