There certainly are cloud competitors to AWS. How easy it would be to use them would depend on what services Signal uses in AWS. Some will have equivalents, some may not. AWS, being around for so long has a boatload of services and it’s not in their best interest to make them easily movable.

But I absolutely get why something like Signal would use a cloud provider. Could it be done entirely on-prem? Quite probably. However could they do it within a business model that would allow the scale of users to use it as they have today without charging significant fees to use it? I highly doubt it. This would hold true for anyone wanting to build a service like theirs that would operate on the their scale. The bandwidth and other infrastructure would be immense and super expensive to buy and maintain. The only folks able to provide that would be big telco, tech companies.

Could it be all decentralized ala the Fediverse? Sure and such services exist. But, much like the Fediverse, getting user adoption would be much more difficult and tour audience would be those tech savvy enough to use what’s already out there. I mean, for example, Matrix/Element exists. Quite secure, very decentralized. But it’s not for the general public.

I didn't mean to put it that way. I mean peer-to-peer is certainly a thing. And we have systems that do that....and they are WAY too complex and cumbersome for the average user to use...see Matrix as a classic example. Quite secure, very decentralized, but not simple enough for most people to use. Heck, even here on the Fediverse, the user base is quite limited because of the decentralized nature is just too much for most folks to grasp..throw real privacy and zero trust encryption on top of it and your app will never take off.

Therefore, if you actually want users, you're going to have some amount of centralization. That means you need to run on something, either your own gear or someone else's. And at the scale that Signal wants to run, cloud makes sense not just for compute and services, but also the sheer amount of bandwidth needed to process the amount of data they want to send.

Can it be done a different way? Sure. Will those methods scale to the reach the average user? I seriously doubt it.

Yeah, well the conversation has several branches.

Centralization simplifies how thing work in general, especially for end users. You have one place to go where you set up your account and work from single experience. There's a reason why every successful service our there has some level of centralization. It's just easy to use. Ease of use beings in more users which helps the service survive.

Decentralization has some great advantages. But with that comes complexity and with complexity comes a lack of adoption. The lack of adoption means that there's no money in it. And that's great if you're a hobbyist, but not if you're a company.

An easy example is social media. Look at all of the massive services. They are all centralized. Look at a decentralized system like the Fediverse. Yes, it's very decentralized, but the audience is very limited.

Now let's take this back to Signal which was the whole point of the thread. Yes, it has some centralized services. Those centralized services make the system work well enough that average internet users would actually use it. There are decentralized options out there. They work peer to peer so there's no need for things like cloud infrastructure or a big data center to run them. Matrix/Element comes to mind. Super secure, decentralized messaging. Very few people use it because it's just too complicated for the average or even above average user.

So if I'm Signal, a company that wants to build a more secure messaging app, I'm going to make some compromises in order to make it acceptable and palatable to a wide audience so I have a chance to make some money and keep my companhy afloat. Thus, something like AWS makes sense. I can get access to huge resources to handle any user load, but my costs scale in real time with my usage. This is sensible. But there are trade-offs. But i think for what Signal is trying to do, those trade-offs make sense.

If you are defining a centralized service as one that runs in a single system, then this has ceased to be an adult conversation, especially here on the Fediverse.

I get only running in one region is a vulnerability. It could be bad engineering…it could also be because of cost. Resiliency isn’t free or necessarily cheap, especially for a company that relies on donations. It’s great that you donate to Signal but I assure you the vast majority of their traffic is sent and received by people who don’t.

I made the point about running in the cloud or on prem because that was part of the pro original post (at least as I remember it…it’s been a while). The email model is essentially peer to peer. It relies on lots of places agreeing on a standard to send messages. The issue with this is that to make that work requires dumbing down the standard and would likely break the goal of an all like signal. Email is not in any way secure. Quite the opposite in fact. Are there ways to make it more secure? Yes. But there is no agreed to standard to do so and thus this feature has not been widely adopted. The way email has gone is to become more and more centralized every day with a handful of companies providing email whose business models do not want secure email. The email market has decided that free is better than secure. The price of free is the provider reads your email to sell your information. I only went down this rabbit hole because Signal won’t want to adopt this model because doing so kills their entire reason to exist. Their compromise is that they handle and procrss the