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Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

element.io

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Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#61

Post by RNCTX »

dtonon wrote: post #51
dTal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).

It is not a service, if it's a link to a download and a bunch of community-developed plugins.

When you take away the motivation to mitm all of the users' chats, there's nothing left.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#62

Post by enlyth »

personjerry wrote: post #35

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

Anyone remember Trillian? I used to use it to combine Facebook Messenger, ICQ, and some other stuff.

All my friends have since moved to Discord now which is way nicer than any other user experience.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#63

Post by cookiengineer »

personjerry wrote: post #35

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

I thought about all that libpurple did back then, including OTR encryption that worked perfectly fine with others.

These days I think that most services try to make money with stuff that was built decades ago already, and they're just keeping the reinventing cycle spinning.

Anyone remember the franz app [1] ...which finally led to the hardfork of ferdi? [2] I feel that element one is franz all over again.

[1] https://meetfranz.com

[2] https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#64

Post by skinkestek »

ho_schi wrote: post #55

This kind of stuff never works reliable of even fully. Because? There is no standard. And especially Telegram and WhatsApp will have absolutely no interest in keeping it working reliable. If you send your data anyway over this questionable services you're already in a concerning situation adding more possibilities for failure doesn't help. I use Matrix and it is certainly a good thing and the connections to other stu…

> And especially Telegram and WhatsApp will have absolutely no interest in keeping it working reliable.

One of these is not like the others:

Telegram both provides a library to bootstrap alternative clients and prior to that they also sponsored a competition to create a second semi official Telegram client for Android, Telegram X.

So I guess Telegram won't be a big problem.

But of course, saying something bad about Telegram, true or not, feels pretty safe here.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#65

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

upofadown wrote: post #46
personjerry wrote: post #35

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

I think this is more like XMPP transports in that is is centralized at the server. Such things tended to end up centralized as it is a lot of work to keep up with the efforts of the people running the services to remain incompatible with the bridges. These days few XMPP servers bother with transports to commercial IM services. I suspect the same thing will happen in the Matrix case.

Transports work against your platform. Running a WhatsApp transport, you enhance WhatsApp's network effect and dilute your own.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#66

Post by arp242 »

ho_schi wrote: post #55

This kind of stuff never works reliable of even fully. Because? There is no standard. And especially Telegram and WhatsApp will have absolutely no interest in keeping it working reliable. If you send your data anyway over this questionable services you're already in a concerning situation adding more possibilities for failure doesn't help. I use Matrix and it is certainly a good thing and the connections to other stu…

> especially Telegram and WhatsApp will have absolutely no interest in keeping it working reliable.

Telegram at least seems to have pretty decent libraries available to communicate with their API. I don't know how often it breaks, but I've been using the "tg" CLI Telegram client in the last week, and it seems to work fairly well (better than their own web interface anyway).

I looked a bit at writing my own as I have some issues with the tg UI; I haven't written the code yet but just looked at the options, and overall it seems fairly decent.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#67

Post by adamw2k »

enlyth wrote: post #62
personjerry wrote: post #35

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

Anyone remember Trillian? I used to use it to combine Facebook Messenger, ICQ, and some other stuff. All my friends have since moved to Discord now which is way nicer than any other user experience.

Yep, brings be back... + AIM, MSN, they even had a primitive IRC connection if memory serves me right.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#68

Post by bogwog »

radicalbyte wrote: post #8
arianvanp wrote: post #2

The fact that content sent to signal and Whatsapp resides unencrypted at the matrix homeserver makes this product completely useless to me. I don't think I want to sacrifice the security for having all my chats in one place. If they can fix that I might reconsider. They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client? I don't really follow why they move the bridge…

WhatsApp's backups are already stored unencrypted* on Google Drive if you use that feature. * Encrypted with a private key which Google have access to.

So the encryption is there so that you can't access your own data (and migrate to a competing app/service), rather than to protect your privacy. I kind of ran into this issue myself when I was helping a family member move to iPhone. Since Whatsapp uses Drive on Android and iCloud on iOS, there was no way to transfer the data.

I wonder if you can get them via one of those data access requests?

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#69

Post by encryptluks2 »

maltalex wrote: post #3

I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? I don't know about others but it's not that much of a pain point for me, and I'm using all of the apps they mention - WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram as well as few others like IRC and Discord.

Too bad they didn't spend the efforts on actually creating a decentralized protocol.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#70

Post by arp242 »

personjerry wrote: post #35

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

> I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way?

I used Pidgin a lot. I always found it very convenient to have everything in one place and UI. Better one client than MSN + AOL + ICQ + IRC + Yahoo! + XMPP.

In the last few years I haven't used it much, but that's because it just doesn't support the popular messaging apps of the day (or maybe it now does, I haven't checked in a while).

Also, as others have pointed out, Pidgin is not and never has been a "service", it's just a library (libpurple) that implements various protocols, with Pidgin as the GUI (they also make Finch, a TUI).

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