We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#261

Post by Arathorn » Mon, May 13, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

subway wrote: post #194

Arathorn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.

Please share a useful workflow for getting a non-technical user onto a non matrix.org homeserver. I've personally run 3 homeservers for communities formerly centered around Facebook, only one of which was technical. For the non-technical communities the workflow was the one provided by riot-web when a mobile user visits the homeserver. Neither of the non-technical communities saw more than 5% adoption in the org. The…

so, you should be able to enter an mxid (e.g. @matthew:wherever.com) on Riot/iOS & Android and log straight in.

Meanwhile, if you go to Riot/Web on mobile for a custom deployment, you should see a page like this https://webchat.kde.org/mobile_guide/ which guides you through the process.

Deeplinking from web into the app is hard, as the only way to do so vaguely reliably is by fingerprinting the browser using something like branch.io, which is distasteful from a privacy perspective. Meanwhile, affiliate links in google play seem to only work about 30% of the time, given the planets have to be in precisely the right orientation for the association to not get lost.

Mattermost might be doing something smarter (perhaps letting you install the app generically, and then getting you to click a custom URI handler link from the web to provision the correct config on the client?) - but would be useful to know which of these failure modes people were falling into?

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#262

Post by subway » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #261

subway wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share a useful workflow for getting a non-technical user onto a non matrix.org homeserver. I've personally run 3 homeservers for communities formerly centered around Facebook, only one of which was technical. For the non-technical communities the workflow was the one provided by riot-web when a mobile user visits the homeserver. Neither of the non-technical communities saw more than 5% adoption in the org. The…

so, you should be able to enter an mxid (e.g. @matthew:wherever.com) on Riot/iOS & Android and log straight in. Meanwhile, if you go to Riot/Web on mobile for a custom deployment, you should see a page like this https://webchat.kde.org/mobile_guide/ which guides you through the process. Deeplinking from web into the app is hard, as the only way to do so vaguely reliably is by fingerprinting the browser using somethin…

> Deeplinking from web into the app is hard

This is exactly whay I was getting at before. Please stop fixating on the deferred form of deep links. The play store need not even be involved for deep linking to an already installed app.

The mobile_guide instructions are where most people bail out.

"Yeah, no. This is too complicated." is the response when they see

"Install an app, then click on a check box that changes the UI, then enter https://foo.bar:8448, then register".

That's a massive turn off before your app is even installed. A flow of "Install this app, then return to this web page" is significantly easier. Or if/when branded builds of Riot are possible, it becomes "Install this app."

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#263

Post by Arathorn » Mon, May 13, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

subway wrote: post #262

Arathorn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, you should be able to enter an mxid (e.g. @matthew:wherever.com) on Riot/iOS & Android and log straight in. Meanwhile, if you go to Riot/Web on mobile for a custom deployment, you should see a page like this https://webchat.kde.org/mobile_guide/ which guides you through the process. Deeplinking from web into the app is hard, as the only way to do so vaguely reliably is by fingerprinting the browser using somethin…

> Deeplinking from web into the app is hard This is exactly whay I was getting at before. Please stop fixating on the deferred form of deep links. The play store need not even be involved for deep linking to an already installed app. The mobile_guide instructions are where most people bail out. "Yeah, no. This is too complicated." is the response when they see "Install an app, then click on a check box that changes t…

have filed https://github.com/vector-im/riot-meta/issues/290

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#264

Post by price » Tue, May 14, 2019, 2:01 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #258

price wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff gets removed from proprietary software all the damn time. To pick a notorious example: have you tried to use Google Reader lately? :-P Others I've personally noticed in the last couple of years include features of Dropbox; of Gmail; of Facebook; of Google Search; and various startups acquired and shut down -- including a mobile app with no backend of its own. When stuff gets removed or shut down, the basic reas…

On the other hand, there is proprietary software still running whose company has been gone for decades. Stuff does not get removed from proprietary software installations spontaneously , unless there are automatic updates (which can be turned off). Stuff spontaneously disappears from a proprietary website, and the users can't do anything about it. Proprietary websites are a whole new form of social harm that makes pl…

> On the other hand, there is proprietary software still running whose company has been gone for decades.

True, I'm sure!

Equally true of free software... and indeed when that situation does happen, you're in rather better shape if it's free software than proprietary.

I think there are good reasons for people to keep their software installations generally up to date, though -- certainly anything that's exposed to today's Internet. And for a given version of $component, the OS versions that shipped it will only continue getting updates for so many years. Because of that, in the example I was replying to I don't think it's unreasonable to see an announcement that, strictly, just says "this feature will be dropped from future versions of this software", and think of it for practical purposes as "this feature will be going away".