How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?
It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.
“President of Signal getting paid less than a principal engineer” must be the take here.
The same argument applies to Wikipedia: it’s a blessing these people accept working for <1M. They could easily get a job for triple the salary elsewhere but choose to forfeit it for principles.
And now let’s focus on the only player who is a bit transparent instead of asking how are the others…
Why are they transparent again? Because they’re a US-run NGO operation to trick activists into using police software that leaks their data. NGOs aren’t some kind of anticapitalist freedom fighters, guys, neither is christian charity. There is a reason why the US government and big tech throws its weight around with these things and it’s not altruism.
It has to be their fault. They have to be as bad as the others. And if they aren’t perfect we have to despite them even more than those who don’t even try and who push fascism in our world, right?
Hey man, this thread is well past the point where responding to unhinged comments is justifiable. Not on principle (I would respond to infinity comments online if I could, because I could help so many others. 🫀), but because this level of dogpiling indicates I can easily summon all of you whenever I desire, simply by dropping a truth deuce here. Nevertheless I will make one last, compassionate exception: You need to seek help. Regardless of whether people think responding with disgust to utterly debased reply guys is a sign I am mentally ill, what you’re doing here is grieving malicious advertising claims that were made to you about “activist software”. It remains unclear to me how a messenger being used by Jeff Bezos and US government officials is a mark of reliability and antifascism. There should be no exceptions to our standards and critical thinking. If they seem necessary, it is because the standards and critical thinking are flawed and inadequate.
Regards, Mister Modal at Lemmy.ml
And now we patronize.
It is clear if you just take time to ask. You give of what you know and think as if those were facts.
They are like any company, not big, just any company nowadays. Their limit is the limit of trusted computing (can you make a CPU execute somthing without it knowing what it does). All the rest can be encrypted, at rest and in transit.
Can they resist to threat like your government? First… you call it government but it is all the country. Laws were there before since decadeS now.
Can they resist against the state? They can resist, not vanquish, because it is the State. Can they be shut down? Yes. Do they have the choice? No, or their service wouldn’t exist. Creating a datacenter which is virtualy al,ays on is hard, this is why the full globe gave up except few companies for which is it their main business.
Instead of announcing facts which are just opinions, ask questions. Instead of despiting what you can have, see how to improve it of replace it. But don’t diminish what is offered (ffs it’s even free).
And don’t patronize. If you don’t want to discuss then go post this on Facebook. Your context is the U.S. , it isn’t the world, and this place is called the Web. I’m not perfect, I’m not above you, but at least I know that I am not alone, that my culture isn’t the inly one here, and I can appreciate when somebody wants to help.
So let’s tolerate each other without spitting on what other people may like because “it has your gov money”. All isn’t bad. Look at the NASA, the Internet, … We could live together if we want to. The question is do you and how do you start.
Stop right there and explain to me how Signal leaks communications through Google Firebase and Apple Websocket. You have no right to demand not to be patronized to. You wouldn’t call someone telling you to pull up your fly patronizing, would you?
The concept of trusting a service hosted on AWS in the first place…
LOL
I’m really trying hard to see the point that’s being made. Is it just the “high” salaries, or is there some other implication? The OP seems to be insinuating that Signal is a honeypot or something. I am going to need a lot more proof than, “hey, these guys work at a non-profit and they aren’t underpaid!” Given that most tech jobs offer stock options in addition to normal salary, it would make sense that base salary should be higher at a non-profit (where stock options don’t exist). Their salary structure also seems much flatter than other non-profits that I saw within the propublica link.
What am I missing here?
We already know it’s a honeypot, this is circumstantial evidence about their role in sapping donations from the wider open source ecosystem. Keep donating to them if you don’t value your money.
We already know it’s a honeypot
Oh?
Yeah that’s why you guys focus on shit like “I was able to convince my grandma to use it” - you don’t understand what is wrong with Signal technically.
No, I focus on that because it’s real. It sounds like you don’t get out much, just judging by how you talk to people. So let me lay it out for you. People are resistant to change and you have to convince them. You aren’t good at that, which is why you’re so mad. I’m trying to get information to help convince people I know and love, which is why I’m asking for more information from the person who seems to know a lot. However you also seem to be bad at providing resources to back your claims up.
No, not everyone who fails to relate to your American experience “fails to get out much”. It’s more than you’re incapable of understanding why someone would avoid centralizing “privacy services” in countries that run the global capitalist surveillance state. What you’re doing is derailing the thread + demanding spoon feeding + begging the question. Your motivation is a wounded ego because someone said you made a bad choice—one that is as easy to fix as installing and uninstalling services.
Jesus Christ dude. I’m talking about how you are immediately hostile to everyone in this thread. Get over yourself.
Get some good software on your devices that doesn’t have a lifespan according to the goodwill of the feds, and have a wonderful morning.
You are being a bit of a cunt FWIW
Can you provide some evidence for your claims? You’ve even linked to another post where you say you’re here to educate people but all I’m seeing are assertions with no basis and insults.
honeypot
You mean Proton
I don’t know the intricacies of signal as a company or if they support any bad actors or whatnot, but I do hate to see flack for non-profit leaders and employees getting paid competitive salaries. Like if people are actually worth that much in the economy, why not try to stack the team so they’re incentivized to do well? Especially in the shit pot that is America.
I would be curious to see the spread of overhead between salaries and fundraising, outreach, etc to actually get their product out there. Because if those are balanced in favor toward actually running the business, marketing it well, and fundraising, I’d say these people more than deserve these salaries.
The company asks for donations while receiving funding from the US government and scraping metadata from activists. You people are absolute marks.
and scraping metadata from activists
You have proof on that?
Isn’t 1M per year upper middle class in america now?
Oh look the Americans are here to pretend that highly-paid tech workers are normal human beings. I wonder if that has anything to do with the demographics of the Reddit-fuelled Hitler instances. Worth consideration. 🤔
I’ve been reading this thread for way too long looking for you to post a single fucking link or source for your claims. You’ve typed thousands of words and 99% of them are insults to people that are just asking where you got these ideas from. Looks like you’re only purpose is to slam signal without proof. Why?
Meanwhile Discord in it’s entirety is unencrypted
I can’t believe that worked. Well, it’s a good thing we have more than three options
To be fair, Discord has encrypted voice calls using their “Dave” protocol.
well well well, this is news to me… but c’mon it’s like an abuser decided to be nice for once xD (not enough)
Data protection isn’t binary, and you should treat companies, products, etc. as they’re and not mix subjective with objective.
But you’re right, overall is Discord pretty terrible in this regard.
Dude, don’t start
They’re still far more encrypted than literally every other alternative.
You people have zero awareness of the limitations of your own knowledge.
Name a single Discord replacement that has anywhere close to the coverage of end-to-end encryption that Matrix does. Unless you’re willing to sacrifice literally every other feature except text chat, I don’t think there is one.
is the argument they shouldn’t be paid money for their work? or maybe signal shouldn’t be hiring at competitive salaries for highly skilled labor?
Just hire from the EU. It’s cheaper and they are as competent. A lot more money will be left to hire more staff. I’ve already moved my signal donation to matrix.
The US is a money sink.
Unbearable: This was the last time i donated to signal. Next time i’ll donate to some small foss-projects.
Sallaries should act as a motivator for better leadership, so these wages, at least in norwegian context, seems to be too high, too corrupting.
What would be the downside if all companies were non-profit? At first sight, it sounds like a great idea.
The conventional answer is that there would be much less incentive to fund new ones.
Some things need a large investment to start: power plants, cities, factories, space stations, etc. Sometimes more money than the people involved can afford, and you need to ask someone to front the money, they typically get paid with a share of the profits.
Thanks, that sounds very reasonable.
The problem is that NGOs and charities are just a way for capital to manage social stability and will never have that kind of expansiveness. It’s like trying to build socialism by starting worker cooperatives in a bourgeois democracy.
Some companies will be invisible and/or “boring” - nobody ever said: “Oh, I just love my office building’s cleaning supplies delivery contractor, I should donate them again!”
What would be the downside if the world was made of pudding
It would collapse on itself, unable to carry its own weight, heating up massively. I consider superheated pudding volcanos something of a downside, personally. I cannot reasonably estimate what might happen in the centre of the world, supercritical fluid doesn’t seem enough. Perhaps nanodiamond crystallisation from the organic parts of the pudding? Also lots of hydrogen release, I’d guess.
My suggestions involves only change of the legal framework. Besides, there are non-profit companies. I’m not sure about details, but for example Velux (windows manufacturer) and Carl Zeiss (optics) are supposed to be non-profits, and Anthropic could say no to the DoD because it’s some sort of not-just-for-profit company.
Is that good?
Raising enough money to pay its employees and expand, but not the most you can without regard to anything else? Sonds like an interesting idea to explore. Or are you talking about super-dense pudding?
The pudding, not the mindless bootlicking. I like when you guys try to be funny.
This is normal for “nonprofit” companies. The former head of Mozilla was paid 6.1 million in 2024.
Guess adb never worked for a non-profit before.
adb is currently main developer for a fork of Delta Chat, a messenger that actually gives you privacy.
you got your messenger recommendation from congresspeople. think about that for a second and how it makes you look to technically competent people like us
But you do realize that DeltaChat also received a quite significant amount of money from the US Open Technology Fund over its course of development and to this day it is somewhat unclear how they fund what seems to be several full time developers?
US and the West are ‘managed’ by elite psychopaths that don’t give a shit about ordinary peoples ‘privacy’ or similar fancy tools for the wage-slaves. They have used these tools to try and break through specific nations/groups information defenses. ANYTHING sponsored by the US Oligarchy is either a part of local US control, or an attempt at reaching more people with rich-man propaganda in nations that defend themselves against US lies and color-revolutions…
