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Comment by BeefySwain | Hacker News Reader

Choice means interoperability, not picking between walled gardens.

Choice means choice, not interoperability. Choice means I get to choose a walled garden or an open protocol.

Except in quite a lot of cases - like communication tools or social media platforms - you didn't choose anything. Your friends did, as an aggregate - as individuals they didn't chose anything either.

Somehow people recognize that illusion of choice when talking about Facebook, but fail to recognize it here? Weird.

Facebook is quite different from this case. If you friends use Facebook to communicate, you need to as well. There is, as far as I know, no alternative. But if your friends use iMessage to communicate, you can easily communicate with them through SMS. Just turn off iMessage, and Apple will recognize this and fallback to SMS. You are not forced to use iMessage just because your friends does.

You wish Apple would recognize this. But in fact my sister did this, and filled out their web form and did everything else they suggest. And Apple still does not recognize it. (On the inbound side. )

She can text me, but when I or anybody else On an iPhone try to text her it goes to iMessage and she never receives it.

Yes this is "just a bug", but it also seriously promotes lock-in. It's a very strategic bug, and if she hadn't bought a new phone she would probably be back on iMessage.

iMessage is not always a choice, sometimes it's for life whether you wanted it to be or not.

>Choice means interoperability

"This word that doesn't mean this other word means this other word."

What?

Choice means companies can choose to be walled gardens, and open source aficionado can choose to implement things with openness in mind.

Choice can mean both things.

How do you open something without spam and abuse?

This is a massive unsolved problem.

With signed content. Assuming you have a side channel for a one time joining process (email, SMS, real life etc) where you get a single use token/password etc you swap public keys and sign/encrypt all messages using it.

Too hard to use. Poor UX. Something like chat has to work instantly or its broken.

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