The competition of who can fuck over everyone else the fastest.

It was also capitalism that told us competition is supposed to be a good thing.

The competition is Azure

It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You're right about the long run but you'd need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we're at the point of end users feeling locked in.

Isn't Bluesky for-profit and Signal non-profit?

You're saying a single company can buy and maintain a server infrastructure cheaper than rates like .0001 cent per request? Yeah I don't quite believe that. An entire industry moved to using AWS because it was cheaper.

AWS sucks for several reasons but let's not pretend it's more expensive than self hosting

The issue, especially with real-time communications, is that you need infrastructure in global positions. They need to be close to people, they need to have high bandwidth. These are things that are really complicated both financially and legally. You have to have legal representatives in all kinds of countries, so it is much more than just the infrastructure, which is the servers and the data centers and that is why AWS and other cloud providers do make a lot of sense for small or low revenue companies.

Self-hosting really makes sense when you're very small or very large but the intermediate position does make a lot of sense to use cloud providers and that is why this model did succeed.

Or distributed serverless P2P communication (like SimpleX does). Specially when it comes to an app that is just meant for person-to-person communications to begin with.

You can run your own signal server and federate it with others, you just can't on the standard app you get from the app store that just talks to the central signal server.

It's all open source though so you'd just need to flip some conf flags and compile it yourself.

Yeah, for example Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud. They operate on a global scale too

The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/

https://bsky.app/profile/meredithmeredith.bsky.social/post/3m46a2fm5ac23

She was misquoted (although the meaning should have been clear). This isn't just "cloud" and bears no resemblance to a web server you spun up at home. This sort of world spanning tech stack is not something any company can build themselves, and there are only 3 or 4 companies that could host Signal.

The world's Internet infrastructure basically supports civilization as we know it, and it's crazy to allow it to be privately owned with so little competition.

In the old days, there would be public standards and interoperability and networks of organizations working together. Now the Internet is a series of proprietary walled gardens.

You don't need block chain. They just can start to self host, instead of joining aws like every other company.

No sht that we only have 4 large cloud providers, it's because all there customers are lazy and do not want to self host.