• u_tamtamOP
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    1 year ago

    A more accurate title could be “Privacy is Priceless, but Centralization is Expensive”: with the era of cheap money coming to an end, grows a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of some large internet services. Signal is no exception and this emphasises the importance of federated alternatives (XMPP, fediverse, …) for the good health of the future internet.

    • Goronmon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I’ve seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.

        • pizzaboi@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          And why wouldn’t they? 90% of the software people use daily is free (as in beer), so of course being told that’s going to change is going to cause upset. It takes a lot for people to want to pay money for something that, to those who don’t value free (as in freedom) software, is no different than the costless alternative.

      • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        At some point society needs to figure out how we can subsidize the costs of data storage, remote servers, and provision of internet to people for free.

        • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          The only real way to do that is government subsidized servers, but that will fall in the same category as literally every other government service: right wing political entities try to privatize it and make it as shitty and parasitic as possible.

        • pizzaboi@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          You pay for these things with your data. If the government is paying for privacy-respecting storage or safe internet access, then so are you with your taxes. I’d vote for that, but I’d guess the majority of people would not.

        • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          There’s nothing to figure out, if the question is how “society” does it then the answer is literally taxes.

      • u_tamtamOP
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        1 year ago

        Yup, it has a cost, but there’s perhaps a one or two orders of magnitude cost difference between hosting instant messaging + calls with something like XMPP, and hosting mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin (or why I do the former but not the later, and why I’m ok to pay for the service, esp. considering that my instance’s business model isn’t, unlike Reddit, to re-sell influence and data).

          • u_tamtamOP
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            1 year ago

            I laid it out elsewhere in this thread, but in short, costs grow non-linearly with scale: you can run thousands of users on a RPi, but a million users requires whole datacenters. Decentralization not only helps with not requiring “whole datacenters” in the first place, they also enable maximization of resources: if you have a NAS at home, or a RPi hanging around, a router idling somewhere, or an abandoned smartphone in a drawer, you can probably host enough accounts for all the people that you’ve ever met in your life. And there are hundred of thousands of such underused devices everywhere, which, put together, would be sufficient to host the whole world multiple times around.

            The other issue is sustainability: with this centralization comes single point of failure. It’s no big deal witnessing the disappearance of one or few providers of a federated network. Accounts and data can be migrated easily. For most users, it’s invisible. Now compare this to Signal running into financial issues: you are contemplating million of users losing access to their account and their data, and having to re-bootstrap their whole social graph elsewhere. This is another level of “cost”, or price to pay, for centralization.

            • Goronmon@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Who is maintaining all these “unused” devices that you will want working pretty consistently? Who is responsible for replacing hardware when it dies? Who is looking into it when someone stops receiving messages? What happens when the person hosting thousands of users just stops wanting to do it? Who migrates these accounts?

              Frankly, your argument sounds more like wishful thinking than anything practical. You’ve basically described the plan as “Magically some devices in someone’s basement will suddenly start running a messaging service, maintenance free, from now until the end of time”.

              • u_tamtamOP
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                1 year ago

                This isn’t wishful thinking, this is in defense of a model where our digital needs would be distributed at a level lower than that of the tech majors, which was commonplace before everything on the internet was so consolidated.
                I’m not saying that everyone should self-host, I’m saying that federated services could be hosted at family&friends/regional/national levels, simultaneously, and deliver a resilient service at a negligible cost. Hardware, which is very much a problem for Signal & al right now, wouldn’t be in a distributed model, and could be donated and repurposed easily. My example was perhaps a bit too extreme, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Decentralisation would just spread the costs over more individuals. Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities. The total amount people who would have to chip in to make the system sustainable won’t change dramatically. Decentralisation isn’t some magic wand that makes infrastructure and labor costs disappear into thin air.

      • u_tamtamOP
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        1 year ago

        Decentralisation would just spread the costs

        …the costs and the risks: let’s jump forward a few years into financing issues, at what point does Signal become a liability and start operating against their stated mission, if the alternative is that they cannot survive? We are witnessing enough contemporary examples of enshittification to know that it’s a real possibility, and that all centralized providers, but in particular the ones not charging for service, are at risk.

        Some would even argue that this has already started in the case of Signal with their crypto payments and blocking of 3rd party clients which are clearly user-hostile.

        Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities.

        Perhaps, or perhaps not. Running costs get exponential with scale. You can host 1000 users on a shoebox computer/raspberry pi, but delivering a service for millions requires datacenter-level infrastructure and tons of engineering know-how.
        Most people into self hosting or having a NAS at home can already accommodate their families, friends and more, which means millions of potential users, without the problem of trust from a single organization