Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...

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.

  • squeakycat@lemmy.ml
    8·
    1 year ago

    Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it’s the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.

    • kpw@kbin.social
      8·
      1 year ago

      XMPP is the IETF Internet Standard while Matrix is just another custom IM protocol managed by a venture capital funded startup which keeps losing money.

      • squeakycat@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 year ago

        I don’t disagree with that statement; however, that doesn’t make it something the general public will embrace. Its mess of extensions are top little too late. That ship has long sailed. And I say this as someone that prefers using XMPP for 1:1 chats

    • u_tamtam@programming.dev
      41·
      1 year ago

      Edit: Sorry, I responded to the wrong parent.

      I don’t believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn’t managed to stabilize its protocol, and they’ve been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn’t sound, this isn’t sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.

      • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        The license change is to a GPL variant from the Apache license. How does that affect the regular user? Wouldn’t it be better?

        • u_tamtam@programming.dev
          2·
          1 year ago

          I can’t pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn’t really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element’s single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.