261–270 of 295 posts
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What if I don't want to use it on a phone?
The web and desktop versions can send an SMS to authenticate if you don't want to or can't use the phone app. https://web.telegram.org/#/login
Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed: 1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc. 2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search. 3. A few basic bells-and-whis…
https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat
Hangouts was horrible to me for just one reason - on the smartphone, it hid info on who is online right now.. perhaps this was designed to motivate us to send more messages, but it meant i could no longer easily know if someone might answer now, or if i better try sms/call/.. and then as of recently, Hangouts just fails to notify me of messages, or keeps re-notifying me of old ones, and now i barely use it any more.…
Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…
Haha! I just tried Vector on iOS and apparently moved about in such a way that I accidentally triggered the greatest notification message: > You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
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Great theory. Except that outside the US people who are FB friends tell each other "I want to chat, give me your number so I can add you on WhatsApp". Outside the US, WhatsApp is winning because of network effects.
WhatsApp came to Europe at a time when there was a strong need to replace badly overpriced SMS. In the US most telco's offered subscriptions with free, unlimited SMS and WhatsApp didn't provide any immediate benefit. Facebook Messenger came later, but had the ability to send messages without contact information, giving people in the US a reason to adopt it. By now, most people in Europe also have Messenger, but still…
We also have a low WhatsApp adoption rate. Lately fb-messenger is winning territority (and so is snapchat, but for other reasons), since it offers good group chat on top of a service that already covers north of 80% of the entire population.
Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…
How is the feature set any different than XMPP?
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I really really like the ideas of Matrix, but the problem is none of my friends are on it. I had the same problem when I started to use Signal. WhatsApp actually seems like the lesser of two evils right now - even though it's controlled by Facebook, they've added encryption and some of my friends are on it. Who'd have thought we'd look back on the days of MSN, AIM and ICQ as the golden age of interoperable messaging?…
Being able to use Gaim/Pidgin doesn't count as interoperability dude. Those protocols worked only because somebody bothered to reverse engineer them and this "interoperability" only worked half the time. I know because I was using Gaim/Pidgin for Yahoo! Messenger back then. Today at least they are using web technologies and I get to use Facebook's Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts and Slack on Linux without headaches.
Personally, if I were a place like Google where the content is more important than the product. I would be having very pointed discussions with the people in charge of things like Hangouts and Allo. There seems to be a lack of vision compared to what is easily doable in this space. Knowing enough of the XMPP spec to see what was never done, I have to agree that the author is right. Google never understood what they had with GChat.
To put it another way. Imagine if everybody ran around trying to make their own SMTP or HTTP protocols? Thats what everybody is trying to do with chat right now.
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Haha! I just tried Vector on iOS and apparently moved about in such a way that I accidentally triggered the greatest notification message: > You seem to be shaking the phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
I've seen this UI in other apps, and I absolutely fucking hate it. Google Maps was a particularly egregious offender, where rotating the device or calibrating the compass would prompt for feedback, usually in the middle of trying to use a map. And who shakes a device in annoyance anyway?!
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Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?
Jabber/XMPP has a number of problems that make it unsuitable for modern chat environments where clients (read: smartphones) have poor connections and frequently want to sleep to conserve power. For example, XMPP wants an always-on TCP connection between the client and the server for the client to appear "online". There's an extension which allows for sleeping, but having async mobile connections in an extension means…