Technology

I assume that is exactly for one of the reasons they mentioned in the article: increasing costs for sms

It killed adoption, since now it's just another messaging app. Most of my contacts still use SMS, and will stay on it, so being able to use Signal was a smooth all-in-one experience. Now I have no point in keeping it installed because like 3 of my contacts use it, so it has no use to me, thus killing potential adoption.

At some point society needs to figure out how we can subsidize the costs of data storage, remote servers, and provision of internet to people for free.

Decentralisation would just spread the costs

...the costs and the risks: let's jump forward a few years into financing issues, at what point does Signal become a liability and start operating against their stated mission, if the alternative is that they cannot survive? We are witnessing enough contemporary examples of enshittification to know that it's a real possibility, and that all centralized providers, but in particular the ones not charging for service, are at risk.

Some would even argue that this has already started in the case of Signal with their crypto payments and blocking of 3rd party clients which are clearly user-hostile.

Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities.

Perhaps, or perhaps not. Running costs get exponential with scale. You can host 1000 users on a shoebox computer/raspberry pi, but delivering a service for millions requires datacenter-level infrastructure and tons of engineering know-how.
Most people into self hosting or having a NAS at home can already accommodate their families, friends and more, which means millions of potential users, without the problem of trust from a single organization

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.

Did i confuse something?

Well, thanks!

It's not about that. It's about moving people over.

You know why RCS is picking up steam? Because it's 1 app. If the person you're talking to has RCS, you'll send messages via RCS. If they don't, it'll fall back to SMS. If RCS was a separate app from SMS, adoption would be really low.

Older people especially don't want to juggle 2 apps. If you get your dad on signal, and then his friend who uses SMS messages him, he'll be back in his SMS app and won't go back to signal, meaning the next time he messages you, or anyone else that has signal, he'll instead just send an SMS since he's already in the SMS app.

Removing SMS fallback was a surefire way to kill adoption of signal.

I heard they gonna introduce usernames for sharing your acc. but to make one u still need a phone to create an acc. which I understand.

Giving out a phone number harms anonymity, which is something they never claimed to give you.

I'd like not having to use my number as much as you, but lets be angry about it for the right reasons, at least