We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You're not wrong. Federation would have higher costs but distributed over more people. Even with pure P2P a-la BitTorrent things might not be significantly cheaper because you'd likely still need to host authentication centrally or federally. You'd only eliminate the message bandwidth costs.

The thing is, we already have a way to distribute the costs - people subscribe to support Signal. Some pay more, others less. Whether I run a node that serves 100 people or subscribe for $10/month, it's somewhat equivalent. So the practical takeaway should be - if you want for Signal to keep signalling - subscribe if you can afford it.