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Message from Facebook: this could be war

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Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#31

Post by sspiff »

golergka wrote: post #21
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Because open-source chat platforms lack features that make apps like WhatsApp good for regular users. How long does it take you to set up a Jabber client? Can you add a person to Jabber using just their phone number?

It depends on the client. TextSecure is an open-source XMPP/Jabber client for Android which does end-to-end encryption (OTR?), and adds contacts based on your address book automatically.

It also supports adding a new contact by phone number, and replaces the stock text messaging application, automatically upgrading text messages to OTR XMPP sessions if the other party is on the same network.

It doesn't do federation though, as far as I know.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#32

Post by pjc50 »

w8rbt wrote: post #10
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

And email is under constant attack. Especially corporate/business email, but personal accounts are now targets as well. Basically anyone with a bank/ebay/paypal account is a target if they have an email address. Spam, malware and phishing are huge problems with email. I doubt it will exist forever in its current form. I expect more and more restrictions (on sending and receiving) and more and more walled gardens as c…

This is indeed why people retreat to the safety of "platforms". It's Bruce Schneier's "feudalism" argument: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...

IMO the theoretically best way out of this is the user-owned cooperative, but there's very little traction for that.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#33

Post by mike-cardwell »

zimpenfish wrote: post #9
NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

I was going to say that Facebook Messenger does work with XMPP but double checking just now, it seems that was deprecated a year ago and will disappear at the end of next month. Huh. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

Also, it never supported federation. Which is the email equivalent of gmail users only being able to email other gmail users.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#34

Post by mike-cardwell »

tomp wrote: post #6

In the UK, there have been quite a few TV ads from Facebook recently. Yesterday, after watching another one, my girlfriend commented: "Even Facebook is making ads now - this tells us a lot about how well things are going for them."

That was also my initial reaction: "Wow they must be getting desperate if they're resorting to TV advertising."

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#35

Post by upofadown »

NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

In particular you mean XMPP with federation between servers. In general capitalism is a force against interoperability.

SMTP is an open standard. No one is making any money on email clients. The good ones have become such a commodity that they are open source. When people go looking for email hosting they get to choose between more or less identical services. SMTP is simply a terrible market. When everyone starts encrypting their emails then Gmail will cease to exist.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#36

Post by Morgawr »

antihero wrote: post #24
Morgawr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late? This is why I simply love IRC.

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in…

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies.

IRC is a very transparent protocol, there are A LOT of chat applications that you see and use every day that are actually implemented using an underlying IRC protocol or variation of it and provide an IRC interface (an example would be Twitch chat).

Furthermore, I've seen IRC being used in a lot of companies internally by most engineers and not.

I would definitely say that IRC has NOT failed, let alone colossally.

EDIT: To reply to everybody and make it easier, I fully understand that IRC isn't universally used (that is the point of the original post) and that is in a steep decline, I'm just saying that claiming it 'failed' (both as front and back end technology) is simply not true. It's old and not as used anymore, that's it. It's like saying the Nokia 3310 phone has failed colossally because not many people use it anymore.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#37

Post by pjc50 »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #12
tomp wrote: post #6

In the UK, there have been quite a few TV ads from Facebook recently. Yesterday, after watching another one, my girlfriend commented: "Even Facebook is making ads now - this tells us a lot about how well things are going for them."

Heh, good point. Google advertises on Google but I have hardly seen a Google ad outside of a page that displays Google ads. Disclaimer: I don't watch TV.

There are TV ads in the UK for "Android", focusing on the diversity of devices you can get (as opposed to the Apple monoculture)

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#38

Post by lmm »

NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

XMPP is literally worse than AIM (AIM is actually quite good these days, shame nobody uses it). Its groupchat support is simply awful, and if you log in from multiple devices (which was common enough years ago and is ubiquitous now that people have mobile phones) then messages will go to one at random and you will never have consistent chat history.

These shouldn't be hard problems given that just about every other chat system manages to get them right (though the hair-shirt of decentralization may make them harder), but they've been obvious problems with XMPP for about a decade now.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#39

Post by pointernil »

dustingetz wrote: post #7
NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

Innovation = invention * commercialization

Kudos for differentiating between those 3! ;)

I personally don't believe that invention and commercialization as suggested by this equitation (maybe not intentionally) are equally important, beneficial, meaningful.

I'd say: Innovation is the commercialization of an invention; it's just the corporate propaganda and internal incentive structure for people within which projects these process in such a way into the world as to make it believe something has been invented by a corporation for the benefit of the "audience". Which is very far away from the truth, i think.

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