Decentralized services like Matrix - anyone?
No, let's continue relying on a single centralized service for the whole world.
WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
41–50 of 115 posts
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#42What, in some regions??? Better to say in almost all regions
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#43>(xn--allestrungen-9ib.de) Jesus Christ HN, can you please use a sane charset
I think that's what domains get translated into when you're using a foreign language for the URL. It's to prevent IDN homograph attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack which basically tries to impersonate a legitimate URL with a fake unicode character. I've always thought that there must be a better solution than to force all of the non-English speaking world to conform to our views though. Chrome…
I believe it's more to do with DNS requiring using a subset of ASCII characters.
Punycode was devised as a way to encode Unicode characters into this subset of characters that DNS recommends.
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#44What, in some region? Better to say in almost all regions :)
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about adding redundancies. Redundancies don't protect you against bugs, and they're itself very complex, so they introduce more opportunity for errors. Even with best redundancy, you'll have incidents from time to time.
It doesn't help either that Facebook made three separate services that should have nothing to do with each other, talk to each other and all route their traffic through the same infrastructure. What they did was purposefully remove redundancy they had, in order to be able to track people more (in order to profit more) and possibly scale easier. Doing nothing would have been easier but yet they still did it.
If you think that maintaining 3 completely separate stacks for 3 different services within the same company is making all of them more reliable, I don't think you ever worked on a big scale services.
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#46Instagram is down for me (located in the midwest). Reports "5xx server error"
Curious if anyone knows why they would use xx instead of the number?
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, I hear you. Also a fan of Matrix, but it's so not mainstream usable yet. Tried to get non tech friends on there yet?
What you mean "friends"?
Pretty much. My main preference for Signal is that it's a charitable organisation. That and a few other bits. Phone number IDs are on the way out hopefully. The dream would be some kind of federated layer, but the charitable org thing is a good start for me.
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#48Same for instagram
Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#49Re: WhatsApp Down in Some Regions
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, lets replace this centralized service that goes down sometimes with another centralized service that hasn't started going down sometimes yet! OR, get people on Matrix or similar so we can actually stop jumping ship when our centralized dear service stops acting in our best interest.
Quick let's replace this centralized service that goes down sometimes with a group of centralized services that go down sometimes. Matrix being federated does absolutely nothing to solve this problem since there's no failover if a user's homeserver goes down. It just limits the potential blast radius but if matrix.org went down Matrix might as well be down for most people.
It does indeed solve a part of the problem.
> There is no single point of control or failure in a Matrix conversation which spans multiple servers: the act of communication with someone elsewhere in Matrix shares ownership of the conversation equally with them. Even if your server goes offline, the conversation can continue uninterrupted elsewhere until it returns.
So right now, if you're trying to message someone via either whatsapp, facebook or instagram they will all fail, most likely because of the same issue as they are run by the same company. If you were on Matrix, you would for sure be able to find a way of reaching this person even if servers go down, that's the entire point of federation in the first place.