WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
1–10 of 199 posts
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#2Nope. Only one has facebook selling your data. Not even close.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#3Matrix is eating the world of messengers. I'm very bullish on the protocol.
There hasn't yet been a lot of thought around the economic incentives of matrix, like who is supposed to run a Homeserver?
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#4I wish that the author had spent more time really thinking about _why_ communication has moved away from email, or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors (hint: it is because they are federated, and so making sweeping changes to the protocol/client in the name of UX becomes intractable.)
It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since the beginning of time, but why can Matrix solve this problem if XMPP cannot? Signal just works.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#5I 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 little more than just passing packets across the network (which kind of goes against battery efficiency on mobile devices), but in the meantime I'd rather bet on XMPP (which has diverse client+server implementations, tiny footprint even on a RPi, approachable and standardized protocol one can implement in a weekend) that's getting really good and hassle free to self host at a family & friends level.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#6Matrix is eating the world of messengers. I'm very bullish on the protocol. There hasn't yet been a lot of thought around the economic incentives of matrix, like who is supposed to run a Homeserver?
I think the same people, wwo run own mail servers. You get better latencies if you will use it for calls for example.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#7I installed element the other day, clicking through what I thought were the most common settings.
Am I supposed to see which of my friends are on it? I see none at the moment, and one of the main things that told me that Signal was gonna happen was when I started to get notifications about yet another non techie friend getting on it.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#8Yes but email also used to be fragmented and walled garden'ed back in the early days of networking.
Chat is still in its infancy as a technology. We are still trying to figure things out: what's the minimal necessary feature set? What should a server API provide to clients?
And a myriad of behavior/feature/privacy questions that different messaging systems handle differently, for example: what happens when I leave a group chat - should others see me leaving? Can I leave quietly? Should I have a choice?
Or: when I join a group, do I get access to the entire message history? Or: what happens when I block someone and then later message them - should the message history be restored? This and many other privacy related problems are handled in as many ways as there are messaging systems in wide use.
Let alone handling of audio and video calls.
Messaging and its feature set should stabilize as a standard way of communication before we can say to everyone: OK so now there's no reason you shouldn't use a standard protocol. If you don't, you are definitely a bad guy. Today though it's still not easy to make a case for standardization, in my opinion.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#9I 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…
Can you recommend a self hosted setup? I want chat + forward to email if I'm offline.
Re: WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
#10The reason why Signal is not an open protocol like email has been argumented by Signal creator Moxie before (can't find the article please help). It has pros (evolution is faster and thus it's easier to compete with proprietary solutions) and cons (single point of failure) and Signal devs are well aware of that. We should stop acting like Matrix and Signal are competing with each other. I happily use Matrix but my grandma will not, ever, not in this world. And my mother has a hard time figuring out what a browser is. If we want everyone to be somewhat protected, adoption cost must be lowest.