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WhatsApp goes down for users globally

theguardian.com

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Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#221

Post by rakoo »

Arathorn wrote: post #210
rakoo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't surprise you that to improve a product, you need people working on it. In a capitalistic society you need to pay them to do that. Telegram sits on the billions of its founders and doesn't need to make revenue, they have money. What company with an infinite supply of money (and, thus, developers, managers, QA, interviewers) are building a Matrix client and can afford to have as many people working in it ?

Element funds a lot of Matrix work, and we have a large team working on both Matrix, Element clients, Matrix hosting, and our various customer projects (around 100 people). And while Element has taken longer than I’d like to improve in terms of UI/UX, it is definitely getting there - cf https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen... etc.

Oh, I didn't mean to say no one is working on the Matrix ecosystem. The reason Matrix is where it is today is thanks to you guys. But I don't think you can say you have as many resources and as many people working on it as Telegram, and you're solving a problem 10x more difficult than what Telegram does.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#222

Post by ryukafalz »

tetris11 wrote: post #208
ryukafalz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. The recent addition of space-protected rooms eliminated one of the biggest issues preventing my local hackerspace from using it. (Of course, it did so roughly as we finally qualified for the nonprofit Slack plan, so it was a bit too late to have a real advantage - but it's an option now where it wasn't before.)

I've been using spaces for a while, but I am genuinely still baffled by it. Intuitively, a space should be where I group rooms or people in a non-overlapping way, and cleanup the side-panel clutter... But I can access all rooms from all spaces, so what is it's purpose exactly other than a namespace in which to connect to other places?

The most important thing in my view is that you can invite other people to the space, and you can use that membership to control access to multiple rooms.

So let's say I were using Matrix for the hackerspace. With spaces, I can invite a new member to the space and they can join whatever associated rooms they want on their own.

Without spaces, I'd be stuck either inviting people individually to every room, or making every room completely public, neither of which are particularly palatable.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#223

Post by nikitaga »

rakoo wrote: post #206
nikitaga wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you can, then why aren't they as good as Telegram, and why should I be holding my breath for their UI / UX to suddenly improve? Matrix has been around for almost as long as Telegram. I don't use either so I don't really care. I just don't expect a consumer service with subpar UI to win market share solely on technical merits.

It won't surprise you that to improve a product, you need people working on it. In a capitalistic society you need to pay them to do that. Telegram sits on the billions of its founders and doesn't need to make revenue, they have money. What company with an infinite supply of money (and, thus, developers, managers, QA, interviewers) are building a Matrix client and can afford to have as many people working in it ?

Of course, I see that. But open source projects routinely manage to meet technical expectations while failing specifically at meeting UI / UX expectations.

That makes sense for unfunded projects because most developers are not good designers, and designers don't have a culture of contributing to open source, but for a project that pays (some of) its developers, it's their choice how much to pay developers vs designers vs managers, and they are responsible for the way in which they allocate their limited resources.

I recently had to move my open source project's chat from Gitter to Discord, not because we like Discord or "don't care about open source" but because everyone is so damn tired of Gitter's terrible UX that it became the overriding concern.

Matrix bought Gitter two years ago, and I kept waiting, hoping that they would improve it, but they did literally nothing to it except connect it to Matrix within a couple months – and even that doesn't work well, with Matrix users still unable to respond in threads.

I assume there is a good reason for that. I'm not here to judge, only to point out that this "good reason", whether it's lack of funding or priorities or whatever – won't change anytime soon, so I won't be holding my breath anymore.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#224

Post by westernpopular »

rakoo wrote: post #42
seydor wrote: post #9

Thankfully there is still email, which never went down globally

You can even use email for a Whatsapp-like IM experience: https://delta.chat/ There really is no technical reason to use Whatsapp anymore

Very intriguing, thank you!

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#225

Post by jmcnulty »

rakoo wrote: post #42
seydor wrote: post #9

Thankfully there is still email, which never went down globally

You can even use email for a Whatsapp-like IM experience: https://delta.chat/ There really is no technical reason to use Whatsapp anymore

Oh that looks cool. Will investigate this. Thanks.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#226

Post by sneak »

jonnybgood wrote: post #148
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is end to end encrypted and AFAIK now has encrypted backups. iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire.

> iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire. Would be great if you provide a source for that.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#227

Post by sneak »

Steltek wrote: post #220
sneak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix/Element iOS builds send all notifications (by Apple's design) through centralized developer-run servers that wake up your client app to talk to your homeserver. There's no way for you to avoid SPOFs for notifications on Apple devices, because APNS is designed so that the only way you can wake up an app to talk to an API is via notifications sent from the developer of that app. This means that if the APNS serve…

This is a problem with iOS, not Matrix or any other chat protocol. If you want more freedom and control over your communications, you wouldn't choose iOS anyway.

That's not accurate.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#228

Post by sneak »

plibither8 wrote: post #176
jonnybgood wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire. Would be great if you provide a source for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Might not be the best "source", but there's clear evidence of it being done in the past.

iMessages are encrypted via TLS in transit. Room 641A-style cable taps do not allow them to be read.

The backdoor in their end to end encryption preserved intentionally by Apple to enable surveillance is what allows them to be read - by Apple.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#229

Post by jmcnulty »

jdlyga wrote: post #175

I'm amazed people still use WhatsApp. We mostly abandoned it in the United States back in the mid 2010's. I mostly use it with friends over in european countries, just like I do with people in China with WeChat.

Like most of your replies, the UK is the same. Its everywhere here.

Re: WhatsApp goes down for users globally

#230

Post by Arathorn »

nikitaga wrote: post #223
rakoo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't surprise you that to improve a product, you need people working on it. In a capitalistic society you need to pay them to do that. Telegram sits on the billions of its founders and doesn't need to make revenue, they have money. What company with an infinite supply of money (and, thus, developers, managers, QA, interviewers) are building a Matrix client and can afford to have as many people working in it ?

Of course, I see that. But open source projects routinely manage to meet technical expectations while failing specifically at meeting UI / UX expectations. That makes sense for unfunded projects because most developers are not good designers, and designers don't have a culture of contributing to open source, but for a project that pays (some of) its developers, it's their choice how much to pay developers vs designer…

> I assume there is a good reason for that.

We spelt out the good reason in the original blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matri...

> However: in the medium/long term, it’s simply not going to be efficient for the combined Element/Gitter team to split our efforts maintaining two high-profile Matrix clients. Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter based on the above list - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards.

We’re almost at the point of being able to switch Gitter over to being a branded Element.

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