Reflections: The ecosystem is moving • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

#101

Post by dlmetcalf » Sat, May 14, 2016, 3:58 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #77

bikamonki wrote: post #75

Are we super sure about this premise: a vendor builds a centralized solution on top of (or evolved from) a federated protocol in order to be able to adapt with speed to a moving environment? For instance, I am not so sure that is the reason Whatsapp built a custom XMPP. I am more inclined to think that decentralized-anything is basically impossible to monetize so companies thinking for-profit will always chose the ce…

I'm writing from the perspective of Signal, which is not a business, so it's definitely not about monetizing users for us.

Good to hear that's remained the case @moxie.

Re: Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

#102

Post by dlmetcalf » Sat, May 14, 2016, 4:20 AM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #15

tprynn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Signal exists, and I can use it every day with friends and coworkers, is evidence that we are not locked in. No one is making money from Signal, and anyone who uses Signal can switch to any of ten different (less secure) apps in five minutes. And if Signal goes away or whatever, we can build our own! The only thing stopping us is that we are a lot worse at designing crypto than Moxie and Trevor ;)

I was using Signal, too. One day it phoned home, got some new instructions from its creators, refused to work any longer, and demanded that I download an upgrade. I was not excited about this, since upgrades generally break things, but after a few days of grumbling I knuckled under. Sure enough, the upgrade is broken: it insists that I have to upgrade Google Play Services, which I can't do, because I deleted it along…

I guess at the end of the day, that exactly my concern too.

Signal is awesome, which is why we want to use it, but then suddenly the user finds they're now inextricably tied to Google or Facebook collecting their metadata - while we know Google themselves have been compromised (technically & legally) and are forced to hand that data over. Notably, to an NSA that has lied to Congress about it's operations, without consequence, and hence is now beyond oversight and reach of regulators too.

Also that the iOS code, which appeared to be free & open, is actually not, because other projects are denied permission to use in a way that's compatible with iOS's App Store). Ironically because the libraries are under GPL. Hey, blame Apple I know, or ourselves for not reading all Apple's T&Cs before promoting Signal, but it's disappointing none-the-less (while also still being OWS's right).

From all their history, the OWS guys seem to really want and be trying to do the right things, within the constraints and trade-offs available to them. The answers aren't trivial, but something about where it's all ended up leaves a very uncomfortable feeling.

Re: Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

#103

Post by dlmetcalf » Sat, May 14, 2016, 4:48 AM UTC

dsp1234 wrote: post #7

No users, no walled garden. More users, more walled garden. Is this just the natural state of systems that require/acquire network effects?

Not necessarily. Microsoft kept trying to make a walled garden around the web. They might have had a lot of users, but the web fought back and luckily today we have 'world wide web', not a totally isolated Microsoft Web, Google Web, Apple Web, Firefox Web etc.

I hated the days when you constantly had to switch web browsers to get pages to render. I'm glad it's rare now, because we didn't give up on the hope of open systems.

Mark might have lost the battle to have HTTP/2 encrypted by default, but at least when Let's Encrypt came out, it still worked in all browsers.

Would we have been better to just give up and have lots of walled gardens instead? I don't think so. I'm glad we have WWW.

Personally I don't think XMPP failed because being open made it slow to adapt. I think we're mostly stuck because ICQ, AOL & MSN just got there first.

I don't envy being in Moxie & OWS's position of figuring out how to make this work. I'll add opinion and some of it harsh, though I'll reserve criticism until I've built something as awesomely globally deployed as Signal.