Kind of off topic, but why is Matrix better than XMPP? Genuine question. Just curious.
They're just subtly different. Why is X better than Y?
WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the fact neither XMPP nor IRC are e2e-encrypted a factor in them catching on? Nobody wants to use a messenger that's public, or that with a single centralised compromise/hack could make all their messages become so. To me that disqualifies them as even being potential solutions to the problem. Matrix has significant usability issues in its currently-available form(s) - but it at least meets the most basic of re…
XMPP lost popularity long before the public became (unhealthily) obsessed with encryption.
Care to explain? I can't think of a single example where encrypting a private message passed over a public network would be unhealthy.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#133Sadly, only governments can break monopolies.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moxie's argument can be found in its essay "the ecosystem is moving"[1], which is highly fallacious. Moxie's Signal is about control and building for himself the same kind of monopoly as others currently enjoy. You can find evidence of that through the libresignal issue tracker on GitHub where he rationalizes barring access to 3rd party clients or servers[2]. He sees federation as the technically superior approach (a…
Your link [1] is actually the answer to/against moxie by Daniel Gultsch. Please be fair and first give the original article so people can make up their own mind: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ There is also a live talk by Moxie at 36C3: https://app.media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_movin...
> Your link [1] is actually the answer to/against moxie by Daniel Gultsch.
True, I meant to move the reference at the end of the sentence rather than linking the two as initially planned, ended-up doing half of that.
> There is also a live talk by Moxie at 36C3
IIRC, that's the one he didn't like to be ridiculed over and asked the organizers to take down.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> _why_ communication has moved away from email Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. > or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure…
>> _why_ communication has moved away from email > Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. Email feels more like a tool for reaching out than for communicating to me. I.e. it serves like an RSS feed and serves like a way for unknowns (or long lost friends/acquaintances) to reach out to you. Sure some people still use newsgroups and communicate daily over e…
Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made … and in the few instances where it's not going over Outlook, it's because it's on a GApps tenant, in which case it's GMail instead.
The biggest threat to outlook and email today is probably MSTeams, and ironically enough, it federates just fine so that two employees from two distinct companies can chat as if they were on the same tenant.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> _why_ communication has moved away from email > Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. Email feels more like a tool for reaching out than for communicating to me. I.e. it serves like an RSS feed and serves like a way for unknowns (or long lost friends/acquaintances) to reach out to you. Sure some people still use newsgroups and communicate daily over e…
Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made … and in the few instances where it's not going over Outlook, it's because it's on a GApps tenant, in which case it's GMail instead. The biggest threat to outlook and email today is probably MSTeams, and ironically enough,…
> Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made
Stuff like that was what I meant. I wouldn't call receipts, calendar invitations and verification emails "communication" (as in person to person). I agree though that email is a prime medium for B2B communication, but within a company you'd usually use another medium (like Slack).
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#137One-on-One chat windows, Group Rooms - the representation itself is very similar in most messengers. People wouldn't care about having multiple messengers installed if they only need to thumb one launcher icon. I think "non-agenda" oriented platforms like Signal and Matrix would be in a position to allow for such interfaces to be called up from.
As with mail desktop app interfaces, chat-window design patterns have solidified on handhelds.
I read about Beeper and am eager to learn about its inner workings, but what about platform support that the messenger Apps can open up to?
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when a popular application get written, it will become the next walled garden. whatsapp uses xmpp. whatsapp became a closed system. PerfectClientXInTheFuture uses matrix. PerfectClientXInTheFuture becomes a closed system. Why? Because that way they can make more money. It's sad, but true.
Whatsapp got bought by Facebook which changed their strategy 100%. They used to ask users for a $1/year payment or something like that, but after being bought by Facebook, they now focus on just providing data to Facebook. I think one of the founders also have openly gone out and regretted the sale to Facebook - "At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice a…
Barely any one paid the $1/year. My estimation from looking into this before is less than 2% of Android users ever paid. At most half of iPhone users paid $1 as whatsapp would switch between free or paid to get it.
The founder regretting is a joke. Facebook isn’t buying you for $19B to leave the company alone forever. The guy is worth multiple billions. No one told him when it was being sold that privacy won’t remain the same? That seems too unlikely.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#139I wanted to like this piece for calling Signal for what it is: WhatsApp with better marketing (with a lot of security and privacy backed by obscurity), but if everyone is jumping ship from WhatsApp out of data syphoning concerns, I'm not sure that Matrix's insistance on replicating and distributing as much metadata as possible across its nodes is much better. The end game is probably P2P with "dumb" servers doing lit…
Could you elaborate more about Matrix's metadata distribution? What exactly is being distributed and when? I'd like to see that if you have it as I wasn't aware of this. PS: I'm not trying to contradict you here, on the contrary. I'd like to deep dive into it as it is indeed a big issue. If Matrix really takes off (which I hope it does) I would want to avoid dataminers just federating to it and grabbing data that way…
Sure! The first "practical"* difference between Matrix and XMPP is that Matrix' chatrooms are "necessarily decentralized" (whereas in XMPP that's optional [1]).
How it works is that users involved in a given room have their servers synchronize the room's state with each other (room state is messages, presence status, read receipts, "is composing" status, …) so when one server goes down/netsplits, messages, join/leave events, read markers, … can keep flowing among online users (and when the server goes up again, it might attempt to merge its state with that of the network while catching-up).
This looks and behaves very much like a blockchain: you end-up with distributed "copies since origins" of the room + all its metadata all over the network (plus distributed inefficiency, but I digress).
*: I put that quotes, because I don't believe it matters the slightest in practice. XMPP nodes can be easily distributed, which addresses the same reliability concern, but at a layer better suited to handle the complexity. WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd (erlang), while Matrix homeservers, especially matrix.org are notorious for their terrible QoS/resources-hungriness while handling a fraction of the concurrent users.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#140To be fair, Telegram's protocol is open and there are many open-source clients with their established userbases. There's even a separate team at Telegram developing an official alternative client (Telegram X) to foster competition. Also, there's Matrix-Telegram bridge in development. So the article's point is only partially applicable to Telegram. >Why does everybody wanting to exchange messages need the same client?…
Would that bridge not require you to hold a telegram account? If not, then that's some true federation there, and they have my respect and praise (as an XMPPer).