I have Signal as my smile.amazon.com recipient. It's not a lot but it averages to a reasonable monthly membership app cost. Note: your purchases have to be done through the smile.amazon subdomain to be eligible (for mobile apps: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011)
Somehow, thinking about how much money Besos earns (is it 78 billions this year? [1]), I find smile's slogan "Experience feel-good shopping" a bad joke at best.
Did you have to bring politics into it? Smile is better than nothing, people are going to shop with or without it on Amazon why not send a fraction to "charities" ?
I never thought smile was actually this effective, but I assume based off of these numbers you are doing the vast majority of all your shopping on amazon (groceries in addition to household purchases)?
I've been using smile.amazon.com since August 2019, and to date I've generated $6.01. I guess I don't use Amazon as much as you. It's like, shit, for the amount of trouble I've gone through to make sure I'm on smile.amazon.com instead of www.amazon.com, I should have just given some money to my recipient.
That's the classical birthday "paradox" but that's not what happened here.
Here, a random person in the room announced their birthday, and the question is whether someone else in the room shares that birthday. It's a very different situation, where I'm guessing you need around a thousand people for it to be very likely that their birthdays coincide, compared to the twenty or so for the birthday paradox.
Sure, but in this case it was a case of me not knowing one could check their Smile balance. GP posted their balance, prompting me to check mine, and the total was the same. That feels more akin to me going into a room and the first person I talk to having the same birthday as me than just finding 2 people in a room who happen to have the same birthday.
The situation is probably closer to this: Lots of people went into a room and asked someone what their birthday is. Only you happened to have the same one, so no one else said anything.
But, congrats on using up your luck for the next month or so. :)
Never heard of amazon smile before, but there registry of charities to donate to is really hard to ensure you got the right one.
I set mine to "Signal Technology Foundation" which I am fairly sure is correct, but there is no link, no description or other method to verify; it doesn't spark a lot of confidence.
And if that wasn't confusing enough, Signal et al call the foundation "The Signal Foundation" while the proper, official name is "Signal Technology Foundation".
Amazon notes[0] that they "will donate 0.5% of the purchase price from your eligible AmazonSmile purchases". Looking at my purchase history over the last six years, that number is closer to 0.25% (presumably because many purchases weren't considered eligible).
I still keep my purchases going to my charity of choice, but make no mistake: opting for AmazonSmile contributions won't move the needle on your charity. You have to make contributions directly out of your own wallet. Bonus points if your employer will match them.
Wouldn't the opposite be giving to those organizations directly? I'm not opposed to Smile, but presumably it isn't intended to be the only source of funding. Still, like you say, it's better than not giving anything.
Sure, it's better than nothing, but I worry that there will be people who think that their use of Smile is enough and might deter some active giving.
I've funneled tens of thousands of dollars through Amazon in six years that resulted in only about $65 of donations, so less than $1/mo.
But I also give $100/mo (x2 with my employer match) to the same charity. So Smile donations will barely register compared with active, intentional giving.
TIL: smile.amazon.com and just added Signal Technology Foundation. Thanks!
Note: Signal Foundation is officially "Signal Technology Foundation", so this appears to be the correct recipient in the list on Amazon. Hopefully someone can verify this.
I’ve always wondered, is there some legitimate reason Amazon doesn’t just apply the non-profit donation functionality to Amazon proper? If not I’m sure we can safely assume “because money”
I wish Signal would also sell something, anything, but sell it: t-shirts, plushies/pillows, paid sticker packs, a "PRO" logo next to your name in your contacts list (to satisfy your vanity), a fake "license" that marks you as a supporter (gpg key signature of your name or something like that).
This is a criticism I give to all FOSS projects trying to raise money, sell me stuff, it's easier to justify an expense than a donation, especially if I pay it through my company.
It's often times not worth it. They are like 20 core developers and alot of them have day jobs, they are not a manufacturing company and the price to have this stuff made by a third party often doesn't make it worth the cost after accounting for taxes.
What are you talking about? Merch is where a lot of influencers make the bulk of their money with often putting less then a part-time job of effort into it.
There are tons of third-party services like Cafepress and Redbubble that let you slap your logo on anything and handle all the ordering, payment & shipping logistics for you. (For a hefty commission, of course, but $1 is better than $0.)
Signal is a great service, not just because of the security, but just functionality alone. Being able to make free international phone calls is great, and the audio quality is better than any cell phone call. I don’t “agree” with all of the philosophical or technical decisions behind the app but really believe it’s worthy of support.
Signal is another walled garder, which sooner or later will become to big to stay sustainable. Then it will be either sold (probably to Facebook) or die. We should support truly distributed systems if we do not want to repeat history forever. Consider Matrix instead.
It's a 501c3, I don't think you can buy those. In any case, it's open source, and there are several forks floating around (though Signal does typically dissuade people from using them, because it conflicts with their strategy around a cohesive experience, and rollout of new features).
Telegram is a product from a for-profit company. Again, Signal is a 501c3 non-profit. It gets its funding from the same sort of places as Wikipedia, the Tor Project, the Internet Archive, etc.: the donation link you're commenting on.
Do you seriously believe that donations can cover 1 billion of users on Signal? I don’t. Only federation is a sustainable answer (unless maybe you convince governments to fund it).
>Do you seriously believe that donations can cover 1 billion of users on Signal?
Yes.
>I don't.
Okay, any particular reason? The storage and processing costs are small, you're basically just paying for enough hosting to route the traffic, plus a dozen or so developers.
>Only federation is a sustainable answer (unless maybe you convince governments to fund it).
The US government does fund it, through several channels (most notable probably being the Open Technology Fund), as did Brian Acton for at least $50 million.
Mastodon instances with a couple of hundred users can easily cost $100. It's definitely not running on pennies, just that there are a lot of individual people footing smaller bills.
Somewhat off topic, but is Signal still tough to use if you have > 1 device?
It used to require you to backup / restore and you couldn't just start a chat on your work computer, continue it on your phone, then continue it on your home computer, while still being able to see the full history on all 3 devices.
Now all chats are automatically sync'ed in real time across devices, provided that those devices are all connected to the internet (otherwise they sync upon connecting to internet).
The only drawback I have found is that if desktop Signal is running on my computer, but I’m away somewhere else in town and have my phone with me, I miss calls (but not text messages). Only the Signal on my desktop rings when I’m called, while the phone doesn't ring.
Nope. I use it pretty heavily, and the only time I had an issue was when I added a new device and had some de-sync issues in the first 5 minutes. Otherwise, it's been a very smooth experience.
On four phones it might work but if one of those devices is a windows computer and you leave it on, you might experience problems with messages or phonecalls only going to one device. And it will forget your account now and then so you have to resync all messages which might take 5-10 minutes. Very annoying if you don't use it often on the computer but sometimes you just can't be bothered to type on a phone...
I am using Signal 50% on the phone and 50% on the desktop and they complement each other well, I don't run into problems. The histories are in sync and the only thing I found annoying so far is the start-up time for the desktop version.
SMS is sent by interfacing with your phone’s modem which is connected to the mobile phone network. How would a desktop app be able to do that, except for that tiny minority of users who have a computer that can take a SIM card directly for connectivity?
The phone app could sync with the desktop app. You type an sms to the desktop, it syncs with the mobile app, mobile phone sends the sms, gets the reply, and the reply is synced to the desktop app.
This would require your phone to be connected to the internet at the moment you press Enter on the desktop, otherwise it could be hours until the SMS goes out. For those on prepaid plans, it would also require that you have enough credit on that phone to send SMS. Perhaps the developers felt that there were too many uncertainties to implement this feature; users might have reacted negatively if it didn’t work for them.
Plus, Signal plans to eventually allow multiple phones to be connected to one’s account. Then, the question becomes: if you sent a SMS from your desktop, which of those phones sends the SMS and gets billed by the mobile provider for doing so? You might say that a setting could be made for that, but any new setting requires changes to the UI, too.
I had a bad time with this a little over a year ago and stopped using Signal over it.
If my phone was off and I used Signal Desktop in the meantime, when I turned my phone back on the sync would often take as long as half an hour, with my phone buzzing for each message received during the duration in which I was online.
I contacted support and, well, it's a free product, what do you expect?
I stopped using it after I received a text message from my then-fiance about a medical diagnosis and couldn't call her back until Signal stopped overloading my phone. Awful. Purged from my device and I never recommend them anymore.
I run private matrix server and all the ux problems it has when you want encrypted chat compared to Signal are just massive turn off for most people. I hope they fix it one day.
Also it's two pretty different things. Signal is mostly personal 1on1 and Matrix is big chat rooms.
I am not sure it is so clear win. It has chance to replace work chat platforms like Slack but i am still doubtful about casual users which is much harder and probably also more important.
The big killer feature of Signal is that once i "convert" someone to use it they always have some people from completely different social bubble that also uses it and that app immediately becomes more useful.
This wouldn't be possible without the phone number. I've used to share your view but nowdays i think Signal way is actually genius deliberate decision and one of the main reasons why it's picking up steam. Encrypted messaging with my buddies has never been an issue I need to replace Facebook Messages. I've realized this when some random Airbnb host started to naturally communicate with me over Signal instead of SMS without even mentioning it.
Yeah, I mean I don't care what the primary identifier for a user is. It started out with phone numbers which I was okay with at the time (since I
only chat with ppl who I'd be okay sharing my cell# with anyways), though I now see it as a potential privacy concern. But the idea of forcing me to submit a personal piece of information (the name field cannot just be an empty space) doesn't correlate with "privacy" and security that they so strongly portray as their priorities. The fact I can't even access the app anymore unless I populate the First Name field with some kind of text -- information I'm never going to share with another user anyways -- is really disappointing and frustrating.
Ah that's a bummer really. I am just kinda skeptical of centralized services. Relying on the benevolence of a single party for your communication is risky.
E: This probably goes for all the chat services which are even mildly popular (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Threema etc.). Matrix seems to be an exception.
Signal’s founder Moxie Marlinspike is famously anti-federation. His argument is that communication will break down as some clients implement some features, while other clients don't. Your client has no guarantees that the client on the other end will understand what it sends. Moxie points to the chaotic state of XMPP clients and servers as an example of this. So, he calls for a single client connecting to a single server where everyone agrees on what functionality is present.
Yeah this is my main beef with Signal. I don't want to end up in yet another walled garden. I see much more benefit to the open standard approach that made the internet great. Matrix is where it's at for me.
To me, it's a sound argument and he's convinced me. Fighting the status quo by constantly improving in a short amount of time is incompatible with decentralisation. It's the same reason e-mail hasn't been able to change and improve, or encrypted email still isn't practical, but I'll leave the meat of the argument to that video.
You've probably given Signal your real phone number to use the app. Email should hardly be any more private.
Even if you used a burner phone, getting a temp email is a million times easier. I couldve generated 50 working email addresses in the time I wrote this comment.
Signal is developed by a non-profit foundation. It comes with no ads or in-program begging, the community is just supposed to know that there is a foundation out there that has to be kept afloat. Really, this is no different from FSF/GNU development for decades now.
