Meredith WhittakerOct 27

šŸ“£THREAD: Itā€™s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but youā€“not AWS, not Signal, not anyoneā€“can access your comms).

Itā€™s also concerning. 1/

Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
Concerning, bc it indicates that the extent of the concentration of power in the hands of a few hyperscalers is way less widely understood than Iā€™d assumed. Which bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration & solving the real problem. 2/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
The question isnā€™t "why does Signal use AWS?" Itā€™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 thereā€™s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
Running a low-latency platform for instant comms capable of carrying millions of concurrent audio/video calls requires a pre-built, planet-spanning network of compute, storage and edge presence that requires constant maintenance, significant electricity and persistent attention and monitoring. 4/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) donā€™t. 5/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
This isn't ā€˜'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
Such infrastructure costs billions and billions of dollars to provision and maintain, and itā€™s highly depreciable. In the case of the hyperscalers, the staggering cost is cross-subsidized by other businessesā€“themselves also massive platforms with significant lockin. 7/
Show threadMeredith WhittakerOct 27
Meaning that infrastructure like AWS is not something that Signal, or almost anyone else, could afford to just ā€œspin up.ā€ Which is why nearly everyone that manages a real-time serviceā€“from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodonā€“rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies. 8/
Show threadKevin Karhan 

@Mer__edith That's why YOU DON'T DO THAT to begin with!

  • Cuz lets be fundamentally clear on this one: There's no "legitimate reason" to mandate #PII like #PhoneNumbers and have #centralized infrastructure so riddled with #SPOF|s that it can't handle a single datacenter outage.

  • Seriously, if @signalapp was coded by some freelancer on #Fiverr for like $100 I'd be okay with that. But how many $ did the development and infrastructure cost you (per year)?

To me this is #malpractice!

Nov 4 at 3:06pmWeb