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.
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.
The difference is that there’s enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won’t even affect your battery life.
Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?
No, P2P = Peer to peer, meaning no servers are required in between.
Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time? What if one is offline?
Yes.
How do you think you’re going to receive messages offline?
How much time does your phone spend offline?
One device can send a receipt when received. If the other device doesn’t receive that receipt it can just keep pinging periodically until it receives it.
You can also just hook up any old phone or computer, install the app, and let it run as the server.
For more info on how this currently works you can check out Keet.io
If you have a static IP address, if you want to bother with securing and maintaining it, if you’re willing to deal with downtime when something inevitably breaks, if you’re willing to deal with lost data or also maintaining a backup solution, if… a dozen other things that most people don’t want to deal with.
Sure, but you also just… don’t have to do that. None of that is necessary fore core functionality of a messaging service, IF you stipulate that both devices must be online at the same time to ping each other.
The only thing you need is some very basic addressing service so they can find each other, and there are entirely P2P solutions for this that already exist and work without issue. See: bittorrent.
The ONLY drawback of having no server, fundamentally, is that the two devices need synchronicity. If they both aren’t online at once, messages won’t get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.
I’m not really going to get into the technical aspect since I feel neither of us know enough to tell how feasible it is (although I think you’re wrong since you do need trackers in order to find at least one other member of the swarm), but this part
I just a horrible take. You can’t base your business model on “modern phones being online close to all of the time”. You can’t have random data loss whenever someone goes out of service area, has to turn on airplane mode, runs out of battery, has a software error or just an update or some other kind of temporary downtime? That’s not how you design any software, less alone a dependable messaging service. You can’t just “stipulate that”.
Nothing gets lost. Not having every packet get delivered is already entirely normal on any internet application, and already solved.
Solving that “problem” is as simple as sending an acknowledgement back when a message is received, and retrying when acknowledgement isn’t received. Routing P2P is more (but not very) complicated than that is.
What business model? Why does a messaging app need to be a business? And again, how is someone who doesn’t have service supposed to be receiving/sending messages? Makes no damn sense.
Basically all bittorrent programs include allowing a peer to act as a tracker directly.
You don’t need to do any of those things. It’s functionally no different from your Signal Android and desktop apps. There’s no configuration necessary.
Keet is closed-source app with built-in crypto, I am not touching it with a 10ft pole. Holepunch does sound like interesting technology at first glance. It doesn’t solve any of the issues mentioned above besides connectivity however.
I wasn’t suggesting you should use it, it’s a demonstration of the application of the technology.