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Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Right, but even if individual instances go down, you don't end up with headlines all over the world of half the internet being down. Because half the internet isn't down, the network is self-healing. It temporarily blocks off the problem area, and then when the instance comes back, it resynchronizes and continues as normal.

Services might be temporarily degraded, but not gone entirely.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    but that’s a compromise… it’s not categorically better

    you can’t run a bank like you run distributed instances, for example

    services have different uptime requirements… this is perhaps the first time i’ve ever heard of signal having downtime, and the second time ever that i can remember there’s been a global AWS incident like this

    and not only that, but lemmy and every service you listed aren’t even close to the scale of their centralised counterparts. we just aren’t there with the knowledge for how to build these services to simply say that centralised services are always worse, less reliable, etc. twitter is the usual example of this. it seems really easy, and arguably you can build a microblogging service in about 30min, but to scale it to the size that it handles is incredibly difficult and involves a lot of computer science (not just software engineering)

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