Interoperability/Federation, please
A walled garden has no long term future
A walled garden has no long term future
signal is dedicated to one purpose, and that's accessible e2e crypted chat.
federation and interoperability severely complicates onboarding. if you have ever tried to get a "normal person" to use something like mastodon, you understand this risk. federation would also exacerbate spam. moderation is not possible in an e2e private messaging app, and spam is extremely user-hostile, so it's not an acceptable risk. allowing third-party and forked clients introduces a host of problems including automated client behavior that's undesirable in personal communication, malicious client behavior that users may be unaware of, and abandoned clients that lag behind upstream.
federated crypto chat exists. if you want that, go use it. if federation is really necessary for your use-case, you will be able to convince the people you are working with to come along. yes, it is the future. but socially, we're just not there yet, and a one-size-fits-most solution is important right now.
Moxie has made it known on several occasions he doesnt believe decentralization is the right approach
I just read both (Moxie and Matrix.org) and I will stay with Matrix response.
I understand Moxie points and the main one is about speed, as I understood. But, as Matthew Hodgson pointed out: the governance of decentralisation is hard, but not impossible.
So, in the end, Signal moves are driven by the market. And, IMO, sometimes it can be dangerous.
> to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”
I think competitive is the key word here. Signal has moved fast in the last year, especially in the last few months. I can't imagine that happening on a federated system.
The other point is it isn't as trivial to join a federated system or create your own node. Signal? Download app and you're good to go. Matrix? Well who has a node? Where are we going? How do I set one up?
Personally I'll be happy with a bridge (like Matrix wants) when Signal is fully featured (I'd argue it is almost there. Just a few things like usernames, video scaling, channels, etc). But I couldn't imagine the mass adoption and moving at the speed they did (are) with a federated system. Even email didn't take off until Yahoo and Hotmail. Pretty much every federated system people are mentioning here didn't gain mass adoption until there was a large provider. Which has gone to such a point that rolling your own email now is difficult and you'll have a harder time avoiding all the spam. So even these examples have moved more towards centralization, if not at least a hybrid.
So what am I missing here? What's the big killer feature of federation that makes things better and proven?
Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what the brand of their computer is or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
Even my young friends who are mechanical/civil engineers and make good money don't see any issue in having personal information in the hands of Facebook and Google controlled services or any other free on-line services who make a living by monetizing your personal data. They either think people are over-reacting about this, as like, if they were truly evil, the gov. would shut them down or for them it's just too much friction to bother readjusting their lifestyle to something else and prefer the comfort provided by these companies.
- email to the same email provider
- phone only to the same telco provider
- access a website through a dedicated browser
- ...
Still don't understand and bother?
People don't care about open, closed or whatever. They care about being able to send a message to others. If only 10 % of your friends are on signal, but 100% are on iMessage, most will just use iMessage.
So the success of iMessage (and the apple stonewall) is arguably just the success of the iPhone.
> Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what computer brand they have or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
You're basically making exactly my point. They don't care, they want to be able to browse, message, play, watch stuff, etc. They also wouldn't care if their messaging app would support different protocols, as long as they're just able to easily message their friends.
> Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
This is why it would be incredibly helpful for a big app to start supporting different protocols. If signal becomes THE app for connecting with friends (no matter if they use icq, irc, email, jabber, etc), it might come to a point where people rather use Signal, because that's the app that can reach ALL your friends.
At this point, iMessage would either die, or also start to support open protocols. (Or more likely: Apple will ban messaging apps from the app-store)
/s