21–30 of 169 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when you've got so many clients and so many servers that the typical user gives up instead
Email exists. When Slack is bought by Google and merged with Hangouts, and WhatsApp changes over to a new all-messages-delivered-by-the-NSA protocol, email will still exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure when the last time you tried it was, but that feature has been working since I first started using it, well over a year ago.
It _could_ be better in that the "desktop" client is just a Chrome app. Personally, I would find even a standalone Electron-based app to be a better choice UI-wise.
I think the issue with XMPP is the myriad of XEPs (XMPP extensions) which are optional, causing excessive fragmentation. Some clients are excellent, like conversations.im. The problem is accidental complexity. Perhaps a solution would be to have a meta XEP that aggregates a few basic XEPs and defines a minimum common denominator.
Also, most people are introduced to XMPP in ways that don't let group chats work very well, so they think that's an XMPP problem, not the service's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when you've got so many clients and so many servers that the typical user gives up instead
Email exists. When Slack is bought by Google and merged with Hangouts, and WhatsApp changes over to a new all-messages-delivered-by-the-NSA protocol, email will still exist.
> A single decision by Moxie or a single court order in some country can make Signal unavailable to a large part of its user base. This is a great point made later on the thread. And already happened in some countries, for example, with whatsapp. Social pressure was big enough to revert it in a reasonable time, but time is very relative on how much you or your business relies on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you can carry the conversation from phone to several desktop platforms. It uses a Chrome extension to achieve that. You can't have two phones synchronizing yet, though.
Yes, you can't have two phones, or a phone or a tablet, or two computers synchronizing. It also won't synchronize SMS conversations, it'll hijack the SMS datastore if you want to use the seamless mode and do a bunch of other annoying stuff :/
> A single decision by Moxie or a single court order in some country can make Signal unavailable to a large part of its user base. This is a great point made later on the thread. And already happened in some countries, for example, with whatsapp. Social pressure was big enough to revert it in a reasonable time, but time is very relative on how much you or your business relies on it.
Genuine question--doesn't domain fronting make it difficult for states to censor Signal? Or is the idea that it's a cat-and-mouse game and the state will find a way to censor even with domain fronting?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when you've got so many clients and so many servers that the typical user gives up instead
Email exists. When Slack is bought by Google and merged with Hangouts, and WhatsApp changes over to a new all-messages-delivered-by-the-NSA protocol, email will still exist.
Hah, Google, have multiple messaging systems and bother to merge them?
* Signal users are not anonymous; Signal requires users' phone numbers.
* Signal is centralized. Is there a way to run your own Signal server?
* Signal uses Google Chrome on the desktop (and Android?) and Google Play Services (or some part of them) on Android (I don't know about iOS). Whatever you think of Google's intentions, they are one of the leading surveillance organizations in the world. Signal users must trust Google.
* Is Signal's system (not user data) fully open and transparent, end-to-end?
* Would I need to trust Signal more than I would need to trust Jabber?
----
EDIT: I came across this comment from Moxie in late 2015 which addresses some of these issues and provides a broader view:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665520
If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:
1) Make mass surveillance impossible.
2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.
It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions.
If you don't want to use your phone number, don't use it. You can register with any GV, Twilio, Voicepulse, or other throwaway VoIP number.
If you don't want to run Chrome, use Chromium instead.
If you don't want to use Google Play Services, use GcmCore.
The world you want this software for is not the world that everyone else lives in. You can certainly make it work in that world with a little effort, but because of how we've prioritized our objectives, that's not the default experience.
It would (will..?) be a crying shame to see XMPP grind to a halt - but I suspect, sadly, that the honest answer to the question is "not one heck of a lot really". I don't know if it got started too early, or moved too slowly, or what - but in the end, it missed its boat.
what's the universal alternative for XMPP?