Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by ncmncm on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:08PM (#26715286)

Agree. It would be OK to make Signal able to integrate payment systems and make this thing compatible with that or with any other comm that implements the interface. Tying them together is pernicious.

Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services, and by being very choosy about who gets ports.

I had high hopes for Matrix, once they got E2EE, but they have flubbed that by requiring a very heavyweight bounce server that won't fit on (e.g.) your typical home router or super-cheap cloud VM. Matrix should enable a place to keep your message archive independent of the bounce server, and allow gatewaying a non-public storage service via the lightweight bounce service.

But Element.io's business model is tied to heavy-weight bounce service.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by miloignis on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @03:51PM (#26716569)

Just as a quick note, I run Synapse (the heavyweight server, not Dendrite the light-weight one!) for myself and a few friends on a modest 1GB of RAM VPS with a few bridges and have no problems. Looking forward to Dendrite getting feature-parity and swapping over to be even lighter.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by RL_Quine on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:21PM (#26715441)

Mastodon, Matrix and others suffer that issue greatly. You can't really run single-user instances without running a gigantic installation, when a minimal implementation of their protocols should have no footprint to speak of.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by remirk on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @05:56PM (#26717887)

That was the case a few years ago. Matrix' server software has improved a lot since then. It doesn't use much resources anymore. Though there still is a large CPU spike when I join a really large room (500+ users) for the first time.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by lrvick on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:26PM (#26715490)

Dendrite is that minimal implementation to make single user instances cheap.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by summm on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:23PM (#26718121)

Yes, at some time in the future, but it is not usable yet.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by Arathorn on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @05:17PM (#26717503)

speaking as CEO of Element, our business model is really not tied to Synapse being heavyweight at all - just the opposite. We provide Synapse hosting starting at $2/user/month, and so it's critical that running a server (including sysadmin) costs us as little as possible in order to be above water. We're not competing against self-hosters, but catering to folks who aren't sysadmins and so want us to host for them.

And as others have said, Synapse really isn't that heavyweight these days (thanks in part to the performance improvements driven by Element!)

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by ncmncm on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @01:38AM (#26720939)

Anything that needs a database is by definition a heavy-weight server.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by codethief on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @05:32PM (#26717644)

> Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services

It's not tied to Google Play Services, you can download a standalone version from signal.org. As for phone numbers, the developers have been working on getting rid of them for a while now – there's already a good amount of code on GitHub.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by lrvick on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:25PM (#26715481)

Have you seen matrix p2p?

Also anyone can run their own servers, and Dendrite can run on very modest hardware like a Raspi.

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by ncmncm on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:49PM (#26715763)

Thank you, Dendrite is listed as "beta", and appears to require Postgres?

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Re:Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cry... by bilal4hmed on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:51PM (#26715787)

Here is some info https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta

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