But far less reliable. If your data center has a power outrage or internet disruption, you’re screwed. Signal isn’t big enough to have several data centers for geographic diversity and redundancy, they’re maybe a few racks total.

Colo is more feasible, but who is going to travel to the various parts of the world to swap drives or whatever? If there’s an outage, you’re talking hours to days to get another server up, vs minutes for rented hosting.

For the scale that signal operates at and the relatively small processing needs, I think you’d want lots of small instances. To route messages, you need very little info, and messages don’t need to be stored. I’d rather have 50 small replicas than 5 big instances for that workload.

For something like Lemmy, colo makes a ton of sense though.

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.

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.

Yeah, I can definitely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, but the difference isn’t so large as to make me use it everywhere, so I default to 720p unless I need a bit more definition (usually for text).

My TV is 4k but I can’t remember the last time I actually displayed 4k content, almost everything we have is old DVDs (so 480p?) and 1080p Blurays. I don’t see the point in paying extra for Ultra HD when the picture isn’t that much better at our viewing distance.

I don’t remember that discussion at all… I remember people being super excited for 1080p, but annoyed that there was no content for it because DVDs were still 480p and TV content was similar. Blurays were 1080p, but weren’t really a thing until the late 00s.

We’ve had 4k for a decade, and there’s still not much content for it. When there is, the difference w/ 1080p isn’t so significant as to be worth the cost, as it’s usually just upscaled 1080 content. 4k makes a lot of sense for a monitor that’s 30" or larger, but for a TV where you’re 10-15 feet away it doesn’t make nearly as much sense.

Yes, as a monitor, if it’s over 30" or so, 4k makes sense. If it’s a TV, 4k doesn’t make much difference given how far most sit from their TV. Maybe if it’s a massive TV or something at like 80"…

360p is awful, 720p is the sweet spot IMO.

I didn’t downvote, but here’s why I didn’t upvote:

• didn’t mention the model in the title
• watched a minute or so and there’s a “wait until later” bit at the start and it’s filled with that ADHD jump cut nonsense every few seconds
• I don’t really care about Apple products

Maybe it’s one of those. Maybe it’s something else. Idk.

No, it’s more that the average person will choose an iPhone or Android Phone and use whatever is built-in instead of looking for an alternative, and this describes the vast majority of people.

It’s not the device they picked, it’s that they’re part of the majority.

When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages its water-cooled coils, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active.

That’s ridiculous. The app should merely talk to the device over wifi, if available. The cloud should only be used to connect from outside the wifi network.

Why is everything so crappy?