Comment by AnonHP
2 years ago
> Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine...
The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With tens of millions of users, this could add up.
Even if every user had dozens of queued up messages, I don't think it equals millions in storage costs. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a storage/database/queue with billions of records and it costs <$700/month.
shrugs
I think some messages will cost more storage than others. I have 4 devices synced to my Signal account. Yesterday, my friend sent me a 6.8 MB cat video[1]. I presume Signal has to store this cat video until I boot up my 4th device and load the queued messages.
[1]: It was a copy of this cat video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s