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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Counter argument: Standardization and federation comes at a cost. Facebook can build a more cohesive product with interesting features by controlling the ecosystem completely. That's the whole point; they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol.

That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special.

An example: FB lets you send one-click "likes". It's a great feature; it means "acknowledged". Yet you can't send it with third-party clients, and third-party clients receive it as a URL to an image of a thumbs-up. There's dozens of features like this. How frustrating would it be if Facebook Voice Calls only worked with some people, or someone's client didn't support group messages?

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> Standardization and federation comes at a cost.

At a cost that provides long term interopraibility benefits. But these just care about short term rip offs and as well causing interoperability problems for their users (i.e. preventing communication with other services). We must be extremely lucky this didn't stay like that for e-mail.

> they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol.

That's the point. They measure their gain in how much they can mess up their users (by preventing them from communicating with users of other services). While gain should be measured in how useful such services can become (enhancing, not crippling communication).

> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber

It's not federated (which defeats the main purpose).

> I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special.

If they wanted to improve things and thought that XMPP can't reach that goal, they could propose their non XMPP chat as IETF standard. Same as Google could do with Hangouts and so on.

Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability.

They won't understand the question. They have a FB app on their iPhone and facebook.com on their desktop, and they won't understand what you mean.

If they want to message someone "on another service", they'll just use that other service.

> Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker News. Ask them if they care about interoperability.

Many do complain about it, but can't do much to fix it. People either end up installing 20 different clients to reach those who use other services (imagine installing 20 browsers to read different sites or 20 e-mail clients to use different e-mail accounts), or simply don't communicate with those users when that number grows annoyingly large. This problem affects everyone, and it's pretty apparent even to those who don't visit HN.

I don't install 20 different clients, and the ones I do install are ones where I want to keep things separate. I don't want Slack messages showing up in my Facebook messages. I don't want Facebook messages showing up in Apple Messages on OSX.

Standard protocols and interoperability do not preclude this. Plenty of people have separate work email addresses from their personal ones.

Indeed. Separation of accounts and profiles isn't really related to artificial separation of existing services which prevents interoperability. Accounts should be separable according to user's preferences, and not according to how services decided not to federate. It's pretty self explanatory.

And interestingly most people use separate clients for their work and personal email accounts.

I've replied up-thread about this, but while it's true that some people complain about it, many also see this as a strength. Plenty of people are quite happy to install 20 IM clients in order to keep different aspects of their life separate.

If you doubt this, think back to the numerous HN threads where people complain about how they want to keep the Facebook profile separate to their LinkedIn profile. It's unclear why this is different.

You are mixing up the need to separate accounts / identities (which even single client can easily do even for the same service), and artificial separation of services caused by the lack of interoperability. Those are completely unrelated issues (first is something that user should have a choice to do, second is something forced on the user).

I explained it here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856612

I'm not mixing anything up. I'm saying that many people prefer it (and actually I do too).

Saying that they are completely unrelated issues appears to ignore a minor detail called implementation(!?)

Almost every mainstream IM client requires you to sign out of one account and into another if you want to maintain separate accounts. That means that if you actually want to use them (ie, get instant messages instantly) you need to be signed into all your accounts at once.

Yoy didn't address my point above. The need to separate identities and accounts is not equal to the boundaries set by non federated services.

And my IM clients have no problem enabling many accounts in parallel. Some client must be really crippled and archaic not to enable that. I can run multiple clients too if I wish (Pidgin. KDE Telepathy and etc.) but not because they can't talk to the same service but for whatever MY reason. Again - don't mix up unrelated issues.

even enough people care about it then it's a market opportunity. You should jump on that if you think enough people care about it.

My assumption, not enough people care to sustain a business.

It's not that. This problem is simply not viable to be solved by market alone.

I could jump in and make an integration solution, providing interop between various communication mediums. So will my competitors, and now everyone has 20 interop apps to chose from, and the problem jumps one meta-level up. Or the companies who own the services I try to make talk to one another will decide that I (or my users) break their ToS and retaliate.

Also good luck going with that when everyone's so big on encryption and sandboxing apps, making sure their interop capabilities are nil.

If consumers cared enough, they would switch from the closed platforms. Not enough people value it, and that's the hard fact.

Consumers won't care, and they never will. Sometimes the market simply exploits a coordination problem, and you can not depend on customers to care there, because they're stuck in a trap and can't collectively express their opinion in a way that would matter on market.

Other times it exploits information asymmetry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, half of the good theoretical things about markets break down completely if you can't assume rational and perfectly informed customers. Well, in terms of products and services having anything to do with technology, you generally can't. General population is 100% clueless. Therefore markets following only their feedback may lead them to pretty suboptimal situations.

I'm not some kind of libertarian free-market solves all problems person. I think markets have many short comings. However, this is a case where I think people genuinely prefer the closed platforms for all kinds of reasons. They are better user experiences, they are easier to understand for a busy layperson, etc.

Yes, and go ask those same people about e-mail interop, and they'll again roll eyes at you. They don't care about it because they don't have a fucking clue. They're just happy it works.

And it's ok. I don't have a clue about how the washing powder works, but I know I can clean any clothes with any powder. I am not an electrical engineer, but I know I can buy any random light bulb and I know it will work with any of my lamps. I know next to nothing about logistics, but I am confident that I can use the same address with any random company to have my package or letter delivered to a person.

The world runs and grows on standardization. That's how we progressed from medieval times to industrial revolution! By standardizing tools and measures used in manufacturing! A lot of it we got by accidents of history. Now it needs to be forced against the market. It has to be, and those of us who have a clue need to fight for it.

What's sad is that the new wave of companies try to transplant their greedy and egotistic ideas from the world of software back to the real world. Any light bulb compatible with any lamp? That's about to become a thing of the past, thanks to the IoT bullshit.

Two days ago, the first day of the quarter, our professor put us in groups and told us to exchange contact info. For reasons surpassing my understanding, they all hated email, someone suggested Facebook, but not everyone was on it. Someone suggested iMessage, again, not everyone was on it, so we ended up using SMS. An interoperable standard.

> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber.

Facebook planned to shut down that service since 2015/04/30, and in my experience they actually did it around 2015/07/12

I'm puzzled as how you haven't realized it... I guess that the xmpp endpoint might still be working for some users?

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

Approaching that event, I warned friends to stop contacting me on Facebook, since I would stop checking its messages. (all of my email/phone/chat contacts are available in my about page, so it wouldn't be difficult for people to adapt)

The problem is that there's no way to disable the chat, so people wouldn't mistakenly use it to contact me. And since I still use the facebook web page somewhat regularly, I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of using actively another walled chat protocol. My kludgy solution was to go and "mute" every single conversation I had in the last year. It basically never happens that new people write me on Facebook, and this way I can still check the messages once in a while, but de-facto I'm not actively using their chat service anymore, thus hopefully not contributing to the network effect.

can you send "likes" by typing out "(y)"?

Not the same likes. At some point Facebook added a "like" button in the Messenger, which immediately sends a slightly-different thumbs-up. On Android it replaces the "send message" button when you haven't entered any text yet, and it also features as an action if you expand the new message notification. Both of these make it super-convenient to use it.

(Though personally, I don't use it at all; a thumbs-up icon feels disrespectful for me, I prefer to acknowledge by typing out "OK" or even a smiley.)

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