-34
Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding
(kitklarenberg.substack.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
-34 points (39.6% liked)
Technology
59066 readers
4390 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You cannot run Signal without "Signal - the company" existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.
As @kpw already mentioned, "Signal - the company" dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - "works on my machine" could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.
This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.
deleted
Signal has been forked already, including the back ends. Session is demonstration of this. They changed the architecture. But there's no reason you yourself could not stand up your own independent signal compatible back ends
Signal the protocol is not going to die. It's very open source and resilient. Anyone can stand up their own signal compatible servers today and reproduce the network. It's a critical mass problem, so you would need some reason for a bunch of people to switch signal networks.
Signal the foundation, and the signal foundation servers may die at any time it's unlikely but it's possible.
Could some project like Molly.im stand up their own signal servers, and federate with normal signal for people who aren't on the Molly servers? Absolutely. They could make the signal clients network agnostic, talking to different contacts on different networks. They could do this today. But, running those servers is going to cost money.