this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.

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[–] who@feddit.org 33 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (14 children)

“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” Whittaker writes. “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.”

To me, this reads as sophistry.

What happened here is a predictable result of Signal's design. They chose to build a centralized messaging system. This made things significantly easier for them than a distributed design would have been, but it comes with drawbacks. Having single point of failure is one of them. (In this case, that single point is Amazon.)

Trying to direct the public's focus onto cloud providers instead of acknowledging this fundamental shortcoming in their design is, frankly, disingenuous. Especially coming from someone in Whittaker's position.

While we're at it, let's acknowledge that centralized design in messaging systems is problematic not just because of (un)reliability, as seen here. It also creates a single point of attack for any entity seeking to restrict, shut down, or track people's communications. End-to-end encryption cannot solve those problems.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 20 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Signal is user friendly and reliable

While I don't agree with some of their choices they do have a point here.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah. I'm the nerdiest person I know—I'm not gonna try to convince people to use something I struggle to understand myself. Signal is good because it does not feel like a compromise, and the advantages are easy to explain. Matrix I wouldn't even know how to sign up for myself, as much as I would love to see the entire internet run on decentralized technology.

I am sure it's not so difficult and that I could find a good instance and figure it out if I sank some time into it, but that's really not the point here. The point is that me doing that would be worthless as I still couldn't convince anyone else to join, and nobody I am interested in talking to is currently on there. (In other words: this post is not me asking for help to sign up for Matrix)

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Honestly I kind of wish that Simplex Chat was a bit more user friendly

It focuses so much on privacy and anonymity that it is hard to use.

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