cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51866711
Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.
Session is a decentralized alternative to signal. It doesn’t require a phone number and all traffic is routed through a tor like onion network. Relays are run by the community and relay operators are rewarded with some crypto token for their troubles. To prevent bad actors from attacking the network, in order to run a relay you have to stake some of those tokens first and if your node misbehaves thay will get slashed.
shame their entire node system relies on cryptobros tech.
tor doesnt need currency to back it up. i2p doesnt need currency to back it up. why the hell lokinet does?
Can you think of another way for people across the world to easily pay each other directly?
lokinet is for data transfer, like a message from your phone to mine, not a currency. Thats why its odd it uses staking instead of any nodes.
Sounds like the staking is a way to incentivize individual node uptime. Also you need to pay into the stake to get going so there is some financial pain involved in neglecting, or worse, manipulating a node. Though it sounds like around €1000 per node, so it’s not really going to slow down governments or billion dollar commercial competitors.
Exactly.
It’s also a way that people can contribute to the network without needing third party payment services. I don’t need to find some node operator’s socials and look up a patron to use a credit card.
If I already have an account with a crypto exchange then it’s easy to pay the operators.
Why is it that only the larger cloud providers are acceptable? What’s wrong with one of the smaller providers like Linode/Akamai? There are a lot of crappy options, but also plenty of decent ones. If you build your infrastructure over a few different providers, you’ll pay more upfront in engineering time, but you’ll get a lot more flexibility.
For something like Signal, it should be pretty easy to build this type of redundancy since data storage is minimal and sending messages probably doesn’t need to use that data storage.
Akamai isnt small hehe
It is, compared to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Here’s 2024 revenue to give an idea of scale:
- Akamai - $4B, Linode itself is ~$100M
- AWS - $107B
- Azure - ~$75B
- Google Cloud - ~$43B
The smallest on this this list has 10x the revenue of Akamai.
Here are a few other providers for reference:
- Hetzner (what I use) - €367M
- Digital Ocean - $692.9M
- Vultr (my old host) - not public, but estimates are ~$37M
I’m arguing they could put together a solution with these smaller providers. That takes more work, but you’re rewarded with more resilience and probably lower hosting costs. Once you have two providers in your infra, it’s easier to add another. Maybe start with using them for disaster recovery, then slowly diversify the hosting portfolio.
10% the size of google is decent. If I had ten percent of a tech giant’s reach in any particular sector I would consider myself significant but I get where you ae coming from
