Signal's president claimed it takes billions to replicate the availability and reliability of "hyperscalers" (AWS/Google/Microsoft/Cloudfare) that Signal uses.

#chatmail and #deltachat are about disproving this claim by

1) making relays super cheap (DONE)

2) enabling chat profiles to use multiple relays redundantly (WIP)

3) distributing relay knowledge among chatters (TBD).

Fat servers, corporate overlords and billionaires: not needed and better to not exist for a convivial e2ee future :)

This entry was edited (15 hours ago)
in reply to sP00kY J

@jaystephens @jackie thanks for correcting and the precision -- we didn't quite follow the evolution of signal's call support. The point stands that video calls were not moxie's original key reason to go for hyperscalers and centralization (see signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-… )
in reply to Delta Chat

they’re poorly substantiated in that they boil down to “large cloud provider bad” without considering why signal chose a large cloud provider, and what they have done to mitigate the centralization. The latter is the interesting bit, since they structured their protocol considering the cloud provider untrusted. This means the provider learns very little about their users, and their main role is providing uptime.
in reply to blazr

@blazr with 2.22.0 you can try out calling, look for "Debug Calls" in the experimental settings :)

Instead of big email providers, we actually recommend self-hosting chatmail.at/relays, or using one of the existing public ones. This is basically how we aim to do scaling, horizontal instead of centralized.