this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The cost of these registration services for verifying phone numbers when people first install Signal, or when they re-register on a new device, currently averages around $6 million dollars per year.

That's pretty crazy. Wonder which third party providers they are using. Maybe the identity verification methods we have today is due for some significant changes?

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that to be the bulk of their spending. Maybe they should remove the need for phone numbers now they removed SMS.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SMS is dead, so they will need to move on eventually. Most carriers are moving towards high data plans now. I mainly use it for verification, although I'd rather use more secure methods.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, if SMS is dead then RCS is what we get instead, and there's no difference to us (and probably higher costs for Signal & al.)

And there are wayyyy too many things that depend on SMS for it to be dead any time soon, too :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Also Signal cannot add RCS support, because Google Jibe servers won't allow other app than Google Messages... And you must use them because native RCS support for Android is halted for years... And you cannot install some module with RCS support yourself because of anti-Unix monolitic Android userspace architecture...

Man, there are so many things done wrong.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I think they are merely working on user ids no longer mandating to be your phone number (so that it can be pseudonymous, e.g. tja@signal instead of +xx0123456@signal), I don't believe they hope to drop SMS verification at this point because of the spam issue getting worse otherwise

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, good point! 👍

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Without SMS verification, spam would be so much worse that they've been kind of obliged to keep it, even though it defeats/undoes most of the privacy features they like to advertise about

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

identity verification is trash anyways, we don't need it

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The article says it's to limit spam. I don't feel platforms like Lemmy (or the other platform) are particularly spammy though. On the other hand I get a lot more spam on Whatsapp, even though it's phone number bound.

Signal is pretty good in terms of limited spam, but I'm curious about the impact if they A/B test the removal and see how much spam would arise. Obviously that could only be implemented after they remove the need to add contact via phone number.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

You are correct my friend, because Lemmy is for smart people like us. And a smart person like you could easily make 10k per month on the side.
With just a small initial investment you could create a huge passive income in no time.
Just go to shadyscamspam.com and become your own boss.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

If more people joined Lemmy you’d see the amount of spam this place would get. Now it’s only a bunch of nerds who will quickly report any spammy activity. It’s a small “friendly” community for now.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Niche communities don't deal with spam.

But the moment it's big enough Lemmy will be rife with spammers and you'll need full time moderation tools.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you go to Reddit which is more popular for bots certain subs are completely filled with spam and votebots. r/worldnews is like a giant circle of pro IDF bots jerking eachother off. LSF became a shitshow too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And that's with a fairly active mod team too. Imagine the spam if there were no controls.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

To be fair, the mods are complicit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

plenty of instances have email verification and or captcha, and those that don't get defederated (sometimes) (this already happened)