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Jack Dorsey Says He Will Give $1 Million Per Year To Signal App 73

Posted by BeauHD from the putting-his-money-where-his-mouth-is dept.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a blog post on Tuesday that he will give a grant of $1 million per year to encrypted messaging app Signal, the first in a series of grants he plans to make to support "open internet development." Reuters reports: Social media should not be "owned by a single company or group of companies," and needs to be "resilient to corporate and government influence," Dorsey wrote in a post on Revue, a newsletter service owned by Twitter. [Editor's note: The post has been moved to Pastebin since Revue is shutting down early next year.] TechCrunch adds: Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor. "I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company," he wrote. The principles he had hoped to build on -- resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation -- are not present in today's Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted. Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, "there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time."

As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development: "There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn't about a 'decentralized Twitter.' This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet."
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Jack Dorsey Says He Will Give $1 Million Per Year To Signal App More

Jack Dorsey Says He Will Give $1 Million Per Year To Signal App

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  • When they ditched SMS in their app. For a million dollars a year, I think they can keep that feature.
    • I ditched them when I had to use a phone number I didn't have anymore to log into an account I had a lot vested in. I still had my credentials on my phone, and there is no way to transfer them.

      My gut is that it's a honey pot. They don't need to know as much the contents of the message as much as they do who the participants are and when they're talking.

      • I agree that Signal needs a consistent easy way to transfer content/accounts from one device to another. I also agree that it is annoying that Signal requires a phone number for initial verification. As to SMS, meh, I don't care. I care about messaging that works on ALL of my devices, is encrypted, open source, and run by a non-profit so that there is no profit incentive and I won't ever be subjected to annoying adds. I don't think it's a "honey pot" and if it is it's one I can live with for the value i

    • When they ditched SMS in their app. For a million dollars a year, I think they can keep that feature.

      The problem I have with having a single app for both secure and unsecure channels of communication, is that I might accidentally forget the context switch and send something that I shouldn't have through the unsecure channel of SMS.

      I am very glad they removed SMS support. This way, whenever I use Signal, to whomever I message through Signal, I will know that its going through the secure channel. Similarly, whenever I use the SMS app on my phone, I will KNOW that its going through an unsecure channel.

      Partiti

      • Aside your very valid reasoning, I'm also happy they removed SMS support, since Signal messaging is free world-wide (on WiFi) whereas SMS costs, at least on cheap prepaid plans, such as my kids have. They do need some money in their balance for emergency use. With Signal doing SMS their balance would slowly dwindle, going to nothing exactly in a times of need.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by G00F ( 241765 )

        when sms support in their app goes away, so does their app for likely majority of their users.

        Funny, after they basicaly told me that I will be uninstalling it in the future, they started spaming me for donations

        • when sms support in their app goes away, so does their app for likely majority of their users.

          Funny, after they basicaly told me that I will be uninstalling it in the future, they started spaming me for donations

          I really don't get that. I use an app for SMS that came with my phone, its fine. I use an app for signal, telegram, whatsapp, facebook messenger. I don't see the problem with having them separate, in fact I like that I don't confuse where messages are coming from.

          I had no idea that anyone would feel that the absolutely need one app for all their messaging... Seems so weird to me. I guess that I'm more like the sort of user that Signal anticipates... which is odd if there actually IS a majority that feel as

    • I'm sure if someone donates a million dollars a year for that purpose, they would.

      I really, really, really doubt that's where Dorsey would like to see that money go.

  • ... his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor.

    Who is the activist investor? Eel on Musk? Ink-wiring minds want to know.

  • But being owned by a single billionaire seems ok to him.

  • Reviving of Usenet maybe? That would be nice but I suspect the angry algorithms will keep winning eyeballs for as long as those algorithms exist.

  • Unnamed 2020 investor (Score:3)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @08:02PM (#63131762)

    An unnamed 2020 investor whose name might rhyme with Black Rock.

    • An unnamed 2020 investor whose name might rhyme with Black Rock.

      I'm confused, why would the the Will Smith Academy of Anger Management want to inves, oh you mean that Black Rock....

  • This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet."

    Hasn't social media done enough damage already?

  • Someone can explain-me?
  • thats like me giving 20 or something a year.
  • They already made good amount of money scamming people with their new crypto coin

  • He give a million a year BACK to Elon Musk for helping hoodwink him into buying the company.

  • > Social media should not be "owned by a single company or group of companies," â¦says the guy who then gives to money to signal, a non-federated centralized messaging data silo. He should have given that money to matrix.

  • Never liked Twitter. (Score:3)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Thursday December 15, 2022 @11:03AM (#63132786)
    Not sure exactly what "a Twitter according to his wishes" would have looked like, but Twitter under Jack wasn't exactly a shining gem either. It was an absolute mess with many problems.

    I really don't care what happens to Twitter at this point. It was never worth saving to begin with and the only utility I ever got out of it was following various Japanese artists who use it for some reason despite it being complete trash in terms of searching and discovering art. Pixiv is a much better platform as far as that's concerned and if Twitter became unusable for that purpose, I'd honestly be overjoyed.

    Elon's rulership seems better in some ways, worse in others. But if you ask me, it was a bad platform to begin with. Not sure why Elon even thought it was worth buying. As it turns out, limiting someone to 180 characters is a great way to get a lot of low quality soundbite-tier garbage and not much else.
  • He ran a messed up company, made a series of unethical decisions because he exercised his political point of view on the business. There's no point to argue that he favored Dems and wanted to destroy Trump. When he banned Trump, his company lost over $10B of market cap that day and the board fired him. Now that Elon Musk runs the company, he keeps sticking his nose into Twitter's business lecturing Musk on transparency, loyalty and it shouldn't be owned by one person/company. That's where the hypocrisy is.
    • Is he a hypocrite... sure absolutely. Course I do have to say the most important thing to know is... just because someone's wrong, doesn't mean their enemy is right. Personally I fully agree with banning trump, with twitters old policies. It's about consistantly applying the rules, and so long as everyone threatening to have people shot gets blocked and banned on repeat offenses, and everyone sending confirmably false information gets their posts flagged or deleted, with no exceptions for... say owners of t

      • just because someone's wrong, doesn't mean their enemy is right

        This I agree... whether their opponent is right has to be separately determined.

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