161–170 of 234 posts
Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
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My humble solution to this is Snikket: https://snikket.org/ I can't claim it has exact feature parity with Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, but it has all the important stuff and is good enough for my family to use daily. It also has some advantages, such as not requiring a phone number (which e.g. means that my children can use it on the old "living room tablet"). Snikket counters the "empty contact list" problem and the n…
Okay, this actually looks like a serious attempt at solving the exact problems I pointed out! I wish you all the best for Snikket! Congratulations and thanks for working on this issue that definitely needs a solution. Is there a desktop app for Snikket?
Having been down the venture capital route in the past and not particularly enjoyed it, I'm trying to work on Snikket as close to full-time as possible while self-limiting to funding that's compatible with the open nature of the project and the ecosystem it's a part of. Currently grants, sponsorships and donations are helping immensely with that.
There is no desktop app yet, but it's firmly on the roadmap. For now I tend to point people towards Dino or Gajim for Windows and Linux, or Beagle for MacOS. None are a perfect match for the project right now, but power users can generally deal with it, and all of them are under active development and constantly improving.
Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
The Matrix team seems to be focusing on anything but making it as performant and usable as Telegram or Slack. The project leaders have been told this multiple times but there is always a reason.
Copied from last "This week in Matrix":
- Another big thing in Synapse 1.69 is experimental support for faster remote room joins!
- The new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composer is available in Labs soon; It’s in active development and we’ll be adding more functionality soon.
- Notifications research is near conclusion; We trawled hundreds of GitHub issues, discussions, looked at competitors and interviewed some users. We’re really excited to bring improvements to your experience.
- Threads is making great progress and we’re hoping you’ll start seeing these improvements in the next few weeks! Keep your eyes open for updates.
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Which XEPs are you talking about? No, this is not a question, this is an answer. At this point, XMPP is not a solution, but a basis for an actual coherent solution to be built on, but it does not exist yet (or anymore). Matrix is also only a partial answer, because in practice you will direct users to matrix.org, and that makes matrix.org not a single point of failure, but still a huge point of failure and matrix wil…
Core XMPP is decentralized today . Room chats standardization in XMPP started 20 years ago. Any server existing today has solved the issue whatsapp is facing right now.
Don't you need XEPs to do any messaging in the first place?
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I'm sorry but matrix is a convoluted mess. Speaking from experience, when there's a deep focus on protocols and technical architecture before usability it becomes incredibly hard for the consumer side to get started. It's still very much a DIY thing and the promise of Element hosted offerings kind of just defies the point of the federated design for what most came into it for, self hosting. Honestly, we just need a d…
Funny, my criticisms of Matrix are that it puts usability (or at least UI/UX) before the technical details.
WhatsApp nailed distribution, Signal does privacy well, Telegram is simple and scalable. What is Matrix? None of the above. I'm sorry, that might come across as harsh but I see a lot of wishful posts here that kind of throw users in that direction without real insight and knowledge into it. We don't want DIY that's endlessly complex and hard to maintain. The reason centralised apps work is because there's no setup, so really you're fighting frictionless experiences. Want to make self hosting a better experience, make it frictionless.
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> You can improve the UX of Matrix clients No. Most people can't do that (because not everyone is a software developer).
I don't think he means you, or the users that needs this, but instead that it is possible to do if they are open source.
Good luck trying to convince the general population that “the UX is bad but theoretically anyone can improve it” is better than what you get out of the box with other messengers.
Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
I'm actually convinced that all the open source messaging apps are harder to install than postfix or opensmtpd thus a true pain in the butt. I get that most are trying to sell services but having an easy to install and setup program would make a real difference.
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> they should care about [...] And there's your problem. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about your should s. In addition, for example, I've never seen any serious UX bugs in Telegram, and I've seen many in Element. Regular users care waaay more about that than some vague notion of "reliability".
> your shoulds They are not mine. It's not my data that is being mined and it's not my business that can disappear if WhatsApp goes offline. Yeah, I'm fully aware that people generally don't care about any of that. Lots of people also don't care about their eating habits, the effects of their economic actions, etc, etc. But if they don't want to face the bad consequences of their choices, they should .
But it doesn't.
Your shoulds look an awful lot like a tribal affectation which the FOSS community uses to exclude non-technical users.
It doesn't matter if the exclusion is conscious (I suspect it isn't) or deliberate (likewise.)
The point is the exclusion happens. Self-evidently and empirically. Outside of the technical community FOSS might as well not exist.
If you actually want people to use FOSS you need to stop shoulding potential users and start making software that satisfies their needs in obvious and delightful ways.
Security and privacy are important but secondary features.
And access to source code trails at the end of the list. It's of zero interest - and even less use - to non-technical users.
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I feel you are unnecessarily combative in your approach. I was making a general observation on the merits of different sourced encryption algorithms. I also would like to point out how your false dichotomy leaves no legitimate position when arguing against NSA-approved encryption mechanisms for the general public. From a security perspective, I don't care if open source is solving the backdoor problem - the use of NS…
Telegram sits firmly within the western legal system and somehow manages to stay online. Their privacy policy references the British Virgin Islands.
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Core XMPP is decentralized today . Room chats standardization in XMPP started 20 years ago. Any server existing today has solved the issue whatsapp is facing right now.
what even is core xmpp? Don't you need XEPs to do any messaging in the first place?