- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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Cloud backups, for security!
If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.
Year according to a wiki page on the unofficial Signal wiki the backup will not be directly linked to the user “It appears that backups will not be directly linkable to a user. Authentication for operations against a given backup will use zero-knowledge proofs.”.
Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can’t run entirely on donations.
Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it’s probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
Wikipedia has way more donors, since it’s basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn’t the default choice.
As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.
Would pay for
As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.
Its happened too much, I’ve asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades
It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.
Good initiative. They need money to work
I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn’t use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it
Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
I commented this in the other thread, sharing it here as well
I’ve been waiting for this feature for a while actually 😅
When I last saw people talking about it, there were rumors that there would be a reasonable free backup (ex. up to 1 Gb) with relatively cheap paid options above that. I scrolled through the GitHub link and couldn’t confirm or deny if this is still/actually the case.
Backups are the #1 pain point for friends that tried to switch to Signal, especially for those on iOS. I have a local backup + sync setup for my own phone, but it’s a lot to expect for the average casual user to set up.
Whatsapp has backups to Google Drive, which is better than nothing but not ideal. It’s time Signal had a reliable backup method for casual users
Excellent news honestly. Trying to get people to switch to something encrypted and the one thing I’ve thought of is that I want to know it can continue indefinitely. Everything else in life costs money- we just never think of it computer wise because we pay with our data and privacy.
This can join threema with a solid revenue stream. I back mine up locally but would pay for this anyhow.
As long as it’s implicit right and is a reasonable price I 100% will be getting it. I am willing to pay someone else to securly hold my (e2ee) data.
If this feature rolls out but you can’t pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal). If you can support the project than do it. But if you can’t than don’t force your self
Switching to Molly won’t necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.
I was saying local backup
Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they’ll remove it when they add this.
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
Interesting, how do you use syncthing with molly?
Well, if you didn’t know, Molly is a soft fork of the Signal Android client.
But, I think both support making local backups of your chats.
I do so daily and keep two copies. These get synced in real time to my little NAS and/or my PC/LaptopThanks, I do use Molly but never occured to me to use Syncthing to make a local backup copy. Great idea.
Glad to be of help! I personally really like Syncthing, since it makes implementing a resilient decentralised quite easy.
Though I would recommend you go with “Syncthing-Fork”, as iirc the “vanilla” app was put into maintenance mode or smth like that
And another good tip - thank you!
If it’s 1 euro a month, I’ll do it
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn’t just buying a phone with more space. I’d like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that’s gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I’d prolly just redirect my donations to that.
honestly thats why I don’t like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there’s also the security about metadata, but for most people that’s probably not a huge concern
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
Agreed. Would be great if we could save old backups on a server and search it from a client, instead of the current option of keeping everything in one local backup. The latter is a real problem after a while if you have contacts that like sending videos.
I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.
