WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
stuker.com
stuker.com
Teaching my mother in law to use Signal:
Install. Accept permissions. Choose a PIN. I can send you messages. You can see your friends who already use Signal. Well done!
Matrix:
When you start you will get to choose from [matrix.org], swirly symbol "element matrix services" (the biggest and middle option, but not the one you want), or other.
Choose matrix.org (nothing else, or we will get very confused). Then click "sign up". Then enter a username and password (need a username which no-one has used before, you can't use your email address. Make sure to remember it).
Oh, but do put your email address in the next page, which is how people in practice are going to find you.
Bonus feature: How do you join a room? Click on it. How do you leave? Maybe long-press the room name, or swipe? Nope, you enter the room, click on the triple dots, settings, scroll down, leave room.
Bonus feature 2: Once you join a popular room, all users of that room are added to "Known users", making the list completely without value. How do I actually find people I know?
Sure but that does not in any way take away from the point that siloed messengers are a bad idea. If the XMPP/Matrix people wanted to they could set up a trusted third party server to link identities to phone numbers just like Signal does. They could even claim to use some sort of hardware enclave to do it. You could at that point create clients that were functionally identical to Signal but that worked on the respective federated networks. Heck you could probably do that with encrypted email and no one would much mind any added latency.
When people are talking about messaging systems that do not interoperate they are complaining about the underlying protocols. Client useability is a whole other discussion. I think there is a tendency to confuse the two in this sort of discussion.
Well, too bad! Usability trumps idealism when network effects are at play.
> If the XMPP/Matrix people wanted to they could set up a trusted third party server to link identities to phone numbers just like Signal does
Usability is so bad that you're defending Matrix and don't even know this is already available, just has terrible UX.
Chat protocols don't matter at all if the final product isn't something grandma can easily use. Element has many of the pieces in place, but it needs go further.
I say this as I use Matrix. I've set-up Matrix for my SO and family just to talk to me, you know, like a bastard. I want Matrix to succeed.
But it's not going to happen unless it can match tit-for-tat the usability of things like WhatsApp or Telegram, even if that means having defaults that geeks find "icky", like railroading the user into a single instance (and hiding non-matrix homeservers in a corner), defaulting to using the phone number as an account without passwords, and auto-joining to an identity server.
If I had to guess, it won't be Element, it will be a new client preconfigured to some (not matrix.org) server.
Sell account packs, say 50 accounts for 10 bucks. Or maybe 10 accounts for 5 bucks. Or maybe 20 accounts for $30 a year? Adjust it for both sustainability with your tech model, I dunno about that.
But the idea is to minimize the number of payments required per account and per network, and allow one person to pay for their entire group.
Ditto has a dead website and it's not on the Play store, there's a link on its repo but it's dead. APKs are not viable for mainstream use.
And I just tried onboarding someone on FluffyChat, and as of right now, it's non-viable as well. During the process I have to go back and forth between web browser and application which completely went over my mother's head despite the textual instructions, and when it's set-up it defaults to Matrix usernames instead of doing automatic contact resolution using an identity server.
On the other hand, the UI is pretty nice and fits in well with native apps, if the app had a more serious, bland branding and a tamer color palette it would be up to task UI-wise.
Signal is even simpler: they use the phone number as the identifier. So you could have an XMPP server with a given domain, and your phone number as your login. The whole SMS dance for making sure you own the number.
That already exists: https://quicksy.im/. And yet it doesn't seem to have attracted that many people. I don't think it was an issue of usability though, it is not so far from Signal, but a publicity one.
There are other alternative Matrix clients that implement an experience closer to Whatsapp than Element, like Fluffychat.
I would love to see another company come along and make another matrix-based chat app to compete with element, hopefully that would result in them both getting better much quicker.
I like the protocol, and I love the idea, but it's just nowhere near grandmother (or even mother) level of usability. And it's not nowhere near good enough for someone as anal as me. People in between might not get put off by all the issues though.
In regards to the UX of Elements, I think it's not great either but it's not the only matrix client. That's the great thing about Matrix.
I now have 200+ accounts in my Password manager. Sure, I know I'm part of the 0.01%. But I can't imagine that there's anyone who does own a smartphone but still has less than 10 online accounts somewhere :) You just need them for too many basic necessities of life these days.
It shouldn't be so much of a barrier, and if it is, they probably need help even with setting up Signal or Whatsapp too. After all that requires a google play or apple account to install from the store too.
Have the employer or pension provider deduct any applicable taxes, and the rest gets paid to the payee. If they do not live in a country where that happens automatically, they could still hire a local accountant.
> Sign up for electricity
Can be done by phone. But if they already have electricity in their home, then even that is not necessary.
> or a mobile phone?
This can still be done in store. In some countries, in-store is still the only way.
An online account may make some of these basic necessities cheaper and more convenient to access, but it is not the only option.
"Oh yeah, you think your id is the mail. Well.. it isn't"
To the vast majority of people this is a feature, not a problem. You sign up to WhatsApp by installing the app, that's pretty much it. Once it's installed, you can message anyone else you have a phone number who happens to have the app.
You also don't need a username for Amazon, Google or booking a flight, and you certainly don't need to try to find out what someone else's username is before you can message them on WhatsApp.
BTW aren't you on tweakers as well?
Here's a clue: Millions of people go about their lives without ever doing any of these things.
Personally I think we've been in something of a dark age for open protocols to our detriment, as oligopolistic companies have increasingly used walled gardens to manipulate or dominate. I'd like to see that trend reversed and protocols like this succeed. Maybe with the rise of the patron model we can actually sustainable fund people who do the work of maintaining these protocols.
It's a lot easier when everyone is using it already. Federated and distributed chat has been really elusive, and that's surprising given that chat has been around forever. This article was interesting because it was about the core problem: how to get a bunch of diverse systems to support a standard mail protocol and is suggesting the protocol behind matrix be used, and not necessarily some implementation of a client.
I don't know where you get that impression.
Matrix / Element works great for 1-1 and small group chats, the general UX issues aside.
I think those are the issues, at least according to the op. I mean, anyone can write a chat app. That tech has existed for ever. Putting the right UX on it is the hard problem good chat apps need to solve.
When I first signed up, I couldn't figure out (quickly) how to talk to anyone I know, just how to join channels full of people I don't know (which to me is like IRC).
Also about Matrix, the confusion when the client app doesn't have the same name as the protocol is so unfriendly for the non tech-savy users.
Having said that, the 'default' app constantly changing their name (Vector -> Riot -> Element) is super annoying. I thought Riot was a stupid name (living in a city that regularly sees riots), but don't really get what was wrong with Vector in the first place :P
Matrix is cool, there's no doubt. The packaging is terrible, IMO. They really need a product manager.
it is not that hard to understand.
Web 1.0 has Wordpress, Magento and a slew of other things. But for Web 2.0 people expect a growing number of real-time services, slick and easy to use, these days they all added audio chatrooms and video calls etc. Everything has to be super reliable, etc.
It would take years to build a suite of components (chatrooms, events, managing subscriptions and notifications etc.) that could rival Facebook / Telegram / WhatsApp.
I would like to think we did it at Qbix. But we are still playing catch-up to the big boys.
User adoption will only come when something is good enough to be used as what’s currently out there.
But once it comes, it has so many advantages: host where you want, configure components how you want.
If you’re interested, look at the links in my profile.
For example, one browser's devs have decided to stop using IRC for support. That's OK, people can still hang out on IRC if they want to, right? Nope, they closed #browsername using the ban-on-join method, and if you don't know to look for ##browsername, the unofficial support channel, you're left with having to install yet another software package just to reach the official support channel?
Long press sure works in a recent version of element-android. (And I remember that being the case for a long time, but might be mistaken here.)
I'm curious - what are your arguments against the switch?
And the places where Signal improves on WhatsApp relies entirely on trust which is what WhatsApp relied on until it broke trust.
I would prefer to use Matrix/XMPP instead of Signal and WhatsApp.
whatsapp uses xmpp. whatsapp became a closed system.
PerfectClientXInTheFuture uses matrix. PerfectClientXInTheFuture becomes a closed system.
Why? Because that way they can make more money.
It's sad, but true.
If we manage to keep the governance of the client and protocol open and participatory, I'm sure we can have clients/protocols that survive for longer. Just like we did with email and IRC in the past.
The founder regretting is a joke. Facebook isn’t buying you for $19B to leave the company alone forever. The guy is worth multiple billions. No one told him when it was being sold that privacy won’t remain the same? That seems too unlikely.
This doesn't strike me as a 'solution'.
Milking data, user friendliness and open protocols are orthogonal areas that gives different benefits. User friendliness makes it so people actually use the product, open protocols forces the service/application providers to care more about the user (otherwise they leave for something else, taking their data with them) and milking data can be done no matter how good/bad user experience is and if the protocol is closed/open.
If your design is subject to a failure, it's a failure of your design.
This is an empowering viewpoint. Let's stop blaming factors outside our control and find ways to create resiliency.
The problem is when a bunch of optimistic, altruistic, talented individuals just imagine we could choose to do better, like in the social dilemma. Similar environments and pressures will lead to similar outcome, like carcinization.
Somehow we still manage to be surprised and disappointed when this happens.
I wrote about this in detail: https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html
When will this happen, if ever?
What is sure is that people said the same thing about Matrix, Bitcoin (and more) that people were saying about HTTP/the web back in the day.
He sees federation as the technically superior approach (and as beneficial for privacy and security), but also as a threat to himself, which makes the point that he doesn't have your best interests at heart.
[1]: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
[2]: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
There is also a live talk by Moxie at 36C3: https://app.media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_movin...
True, I meant to move the reference at the end of the sentence rather than linking the two as initially planned, ended-up doing half of that.
> There is also a live talk by Moxie at 36C3
IIRC, that's the one he didn't like to be ridiculed over and asked the organizers to take down.
This is repeated every single time, when the reality is that Moxie asked the organizers _in advance_ not to record the talk[0]:
> I just prefer to present something as part of a conversation that’s happening in a place, rather than a webinar that I’m broadcasting forever to the world. I have less faith in the internet as a place where a conversation can happen, and the timelessness of it decontextualizes.
Also, "grandma" is an annoying cliche/placeholder. No law says that young males understand any kind of app or sign-up process immediately.
It is an open protocol, it is not a federated protocol.
In olden times (1990s), you needed standards because you had multiple platforms, and slow updates, people actually had to download and install an update to get it. Now with app stores and web apps updates are automatic. This means the rate of change can be faster and thus sticking to standards is causing more issues.
The system that's coped best with keeping standards is HTML, it's flexible, it's full of inconsistencies, it's mostly developed by companies inventing things and seeing if they catch on, and then standardising those things. And pretty much everyone's just switched to using Chromium.
It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since the beginning of time, but why can Matrix solve this problem if XMPP cannot? Signal just works.
Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago.
> or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors
Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure as a result
> making sweeping changes to the protocol/client in the name of UX becomes intractable.
This starts to be dated, but is a counter-example: https://gultsch.de/objection.html XMPP keeps evolving, and probably faster, and with better adoption than something centralized like Skype for instance. Moreover, we've arguably less feature-packed messengers now than we had two decades ago.
> It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since the beginning of time, but why can Matrix solve this problem if XMPP cannot? Signal just works.
The irony. Signal contributes to fragmentation. We seem to pretend that it's a protocol/technical issue, but did you know that WhatsApp runs on XMPP, so did Google Talk, and Facebook Messenger early on? All those silos could open federation and let messages be exchanged across services, but chose not to do so (including Signal), because they have more to gain in keeping you hostage.
> Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago.
Email feels more like a tool for reaching out than for communicating to me. I.e. it serves like an RSS feed and serves like a way for unknowns (or long lost friends/acquaintances) to reach out to you.
Sure some people still use newsgroups and communicate daily over email, but for most people it's just a method to sign up for accounts in walled gardens.
The biggest threat to outlook and email today is probably MSTeams, and ironically enough, it federates just fine so that two employees from two distinct companies can chat as if they were on the same tenant.
Stuff like that was what I meant. I wouldn't call receipts, calendar invitations and verification emails "communication" (as in person to person). I agree though that email is a prime medium for B2B communication, but within a company you'd usually use another medium (like Slack).
I think OP meant that there's been a significant decrease in usage. In my case I can definitely relate to this for personal communications, I no longer send emails to personal acquaintances, I mostly use email for professional purposes, so I think OP's point stands.
> Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure as a result
Maybe marketing would work, but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run. WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay. Decentralization, like being-open source, does not provide short-term benefits to a user, so you still need distinguishing features.
> did you know that WhatsApp runs on XMPP [...] All those silos could open federation and let messages be exchanged across services but chose not to do so (including Signal), because they have more to gain in keeping you hostage.
WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO (or this name wouldn't exist). From the little information I found, it uses a customized version of XMPP, which is also probably not directly compatible with XMPP.
My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other. I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it (and there are simpler ways to prevent 3rd party clients), they wanted to implement something which was missing. They wanted to customize XMPP to add features (pretty much Moxie's argument against federation).
XMPP's killer feature is, for me, its pubsub capability (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html). From a technical point of view it's just an ordered key-value store with notification, but from a user point of view it allows way more uses than "simply" messaging: microblogging (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html, can replace twitter), generic status updating (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html), good-old key-value store (keys for OMEMO), standard blogging (to replace Facebook)
XMPP also has message types and threadings, so you can build stuff like forums (to replace Reddit), diffusion lists (like Telegram channels)...
It has everything, and it is there to be used. Some clients have done it for some time now, it's not a technical problem anymore; it's a marketing problem. None of what Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger or Telegram or Signal do cannot be done by XMPP.
I think we can agree that they have different strengths, I haven't seen much change in my usage of email for chatting with personal acquaintances because email has never been going strong there, unlike Instant Messaging…
> but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run
…if one thing, popular IM of today pack less features, not more, than those they replaced. Remember the golden age of MSN messenger? You had whiteboards, tictactoe/chess/… games with friends, screen sharing, fancy fonts & colors, "now listening to:" , wizz, … Ironically, XMPP inherited all those features out of necessity to be compatible with all those protocols (and I don't think it matters the slightest).
XMPP does have quite nice and unique features of its own, if check-out the other response :)
> WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay
just like every other messenger then and now… (I'm not downplaying their coming ahead of this fierce competition, they must have done something right indeed, but "IM as a cheap alternatives to SMS" was popular a decade before WA)
> WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO
"Signal Protocol" is a mashup of encryption algorithms, signaling and session negotiation, at its very core there is the double-ratchet algorithm (for forward secrecy) and prekeys (for offline delivery), OMEMO is just that, implemented over XMPP primitives (with prekeys served over PubSub/PEP).
> My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other.
Indeed, it would take some careful considerations, but eh, same can be said about TLS. At a first glance, I don't see anything radically difficult about it, the main point would probably be to offer a generic endpoint to serve prekeys and there's nothing revolutionary or difficult about that.
> I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it
They did what every big business does: they optimized for their specific needs. When they decided that compatibility wasn't something they could monetize, they shut the gateway down and stopped caring about it. That tells nothing about the protocol, its capabilities, or of a presumed inability to extend it. For that matter, the X in XMPP stands for "eXtensible" protocol, and it's been quite good at keeping up for about 22 years, now :)
If you ignore IRC...
"Signal just works."
It also contributes to the fragmentation you complained about, because it is closed -- no federation, no third party clients, not even a web client. If you are on a platform the Signal team does not have time to deal with then there is no option for you. If you have a specific need that the Signal team cannot take the time to support, too bad. More problematic than lacking federation is lacking any third party client software.
Whenever I confront developers about this the conversation usually results in someone demanding a specific example of a user need they are not meeting; if I give one, they say, "Oh, we are planning that, but we first need to do $XYZ!" and if I say "there are needs we may not be aware of" they say "Well we are trying to do $this or $that, we can't solve everyone's problems!" As if users who have unusual or overlooked needs deserve to be cut off from everyone else...
signal-cli is an example of a 3rd party client which is tolerated for now: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli
The main problem right now is that they don't have enough developers to take care of everything, but it's not specific to centralized services (no developer == no code). If you care about it, you can develop your own client using their library (à la signal-cli).
Regarding your last paragraph: I could probably list 20 features I'd like to see in Signal. That doesn't mean I want somebody implementing them with no guarantee about how securely they are implemented. One of the main goals of Signal is to provide guarantees against dragnet surveillance, and that constraint takes precedence.
Also it is somewhat interesting that this Open Source centralised Signal server, where centralisation means you can move quicker, hasn't seen a commit in 10 months.
Compare it to Matrix Synapse https://merge-chance.info/target?repo=https://github.com/mat...
The story with the flagship clients in both spaces is very similar.
Nobody wants to use a messenger that's public, or that with a single centralised compromise/hack could make all their messages become so.
To me that disqualifies them as even being potential solutions to the problem.
Matrix has significant usability issues in its currently-available form(s) - but it at least meets the most basic of requirements that user messages are private, and does so fundamentally.
Really though, why is end-to-end encryption the one thing that should disqualify a system? What about a10y, i18n, etc.? For a vision-impaired user a10y matters a whole lot more than encryption. That is the real point of openness and federation -- allowing users' needs to be met by any developers who have the time and inclination to do so, rather than leaving users at the mercy of a single team (or even a single person).
Because security as an afterthought is known to fail.
That is what being religious about these things gets you. Signal is completely closed and its users are at the mercy of the developers. XMPP+OTR was a kludge but it worked and the only reason the outstanding problems were not resolved is that the cryptographers behind OTR decided to focus on Signal. Matrix is basically irrelevant right now and whatever security benefits it might have are equally irrelevant because very few people are using it.
Telegram's far better UX than Whatsapp is possible because they do not have e2ee on anything but Secret Chats (and I've never seen anyone on Telegram using them). See, for most users the promise of security is better than actual security and all attached UX problems.
The end game is probably P2P with "dumb" servers doing little more than just passing packets across the network (which kind of goes against battery efficiency on mobile devices), but in the meantime I'd rather bet on XMPP (which has diverse client+server implementations, tiny footprint even on a RPi, approachable and standardized protocol one can implement in a weekend) that's getting really good and hassle free to self host at a family & friends level.
PS: I'm not trying to contradict you here, on the contrary. I'd like to deep dive into it as it is indeed a big issue. If Matrix really takes off (which I hope it does) I would want to avoid dataminers just federating to it and grabbing data that way.
Of course some metadata would need to be able to be shared for the federated network to function. I understand that too.
How it works is that users involved in a given room have their servers synchronize the room's state with each other (room state is messages, presence status, read receipts, "is composing" status, …) so when one server goes down/netsplits, messages, join/leave events, read markers, … can keep flowing among online users (and when the server goes up again, it might attempt to merge its state with that of the network while catching-up).
This looks and behaves very much like a blockchain: you end-up with distributed "copies since origins" of the room + all its metadata all over the network (plus distributed inefficiency, but I digress).
*: I put that quotes, because I don't believe it matters the slightest in practice. XMPP nodes can be easily distributed, which addresses the same reliability concern, but at a layer better suited to handle the complexity. WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd (erlang), while Matrix homeservers, especially matrix.org are notorious for their terrible QoS/resources-hungriness while handling a fraction of the concurrent users.
I assume not every node gets the metadata for all the rooms in the world, just the ones its users participate in? Anyway looking forward to investigating this.
When/if the actual server comes of age, you’ll have additional features like online indicators and stuff. Bit it’s already usable today (if somewhat wasteful in bandwidth and storage compared to e.g. Signal) and there are no new accounts to register or discover — it’s usable with standard email as transport.
XMPP does manage offline message catch-up across all devices, and with good mobile clients I've never felt the need to redirect to email (especially these days with ubiquitous E2EE, that's not something you would want the server to be capable of doing), that said I believe it would be "easily" scripted up.
There's no forward-to-mail, but happy to consider a feature request.
There's no limit to the amount of text I can send and it's not ephemeral. Thus there's really nothing preventing me from typing out thoughtful messages, which I do.
As for attention, anything can suck away attention if you let it. I don't find WhatsApp (or other similar chat apps) to be any worse than e-mail or snail mail. I look at them when I want to and no more. Again, there's no real rush, because the messages aren't ephemeral. [1]
There are social media sites that truly lead towards shallow conversations, like reddit where a quick joke gets more upvotes, or twitter where you have a tiny character limit and your message gets immediately drowned by everyone else's latest angry tweet.
What's more, I've seen plenty of shallow conversations face to face. Thus I think it depends very much on the specific human to human match whether they will have any meaningful deep conversations. If the humans are capable of it, they can do it on WhatsApp as easily as face to face. [2]
--
[1] Unless of course you specifically configure them to be ephemeral, e.g. in Signal.
[2] Yes I realize that face to face has the benefit of body language, but WhatsApp has the benefit of remoteness and asynchronicity. Thus I'll call it a wash.
The first time I worked for myself - pre social media - was really, really lonely. This pandemic and lockdown is really, really lonely.
I can silence my phone, I can turn the screen away from me. I can focus when I want to. But it's truly a blessing knowing I have WhatsApp groups with friends just bantering away throughout the day. Doesn't have to be meaningful, it's just great having that "water cooler" interaction.
So no, it doesn't frighten me in the slightest.
Other than platforms with character count limits like Twitter, I don't see why the platform itself should have much affect on the depth or meaningfulness of conversations.
If you include "face to face" in your "platforms", then it absolutely blows anything else out of the water in terms of depth and meaningfulness of conversations (on average).
I left Whatsapp (and Signal) a few weeks ago, and feel like a better human.
We should try to imitate patent protection and award copyright protections only if and for as long as software author publishes full description of the file formats and network protocols his software uses.
That was idea with patent protections. You get protection on the condition that you disclose details of your design to enable interoperability by future inventors, manufacturers and users.
People are happy with walled gardens. Look at Apple success.
More practical is porting a regular number to a SIP service so that you can receive important things via app. (2FA short codes typically don’t work with numbers that are assigned to SIP providers, but work fine you you port over a number from a regular carrier.)
It’s not practical to pay for a static phone number and SIP service. Phone numbers are stupid. They’re insecure, expensive, and region locked (no such thing as international number, many services only support numbers with specific country code).
They do if you want to be able to log in to any of Apple’s developer portal.
> It’s not practical to pay for a static phone number and SIP service.
It’s cheap to the level of being negligible. Exact cost depends on what number you want to get, but I’ve got a North American number that after initial SIM and porting fees is indefinitely zero-cost.
I wish we could do away with phone numbers. I’ve tried to do without, and found it impossible.
There hasn't yet been a lot of thought around the economic incentives of matrix, like who is supposed to run a Homeserver?
>Why does everybody wanting to exchange messages need the same client?
Why not go a step further and ask why everybody need the same protocol?
The only difference between any of them to the end user is some are privately funded/operated
As technical inventions they’re all black boxes most users won’t understand
Am I to audit all the code to make sure some Matrix node hasn’t figured me out?
All blog posts like this do is reiterate for me that as clever as their understanding of a particular abstraction, programmers are opinionated humans looking to manipulate based upon the perception their insight is somehow better, like everyone else
Someone somewhere can figure out who you are because you merely use a technology. It can all be traced back to a purchase or a manufacturer or a radio tower
Pretending software can hide physical reality is weirdly cognitive dissonant
The downfall of email is a byproduct of “smart-ass” clients that add spy pixels, scheduled messages, automatic reminders, Rich HTML emails that looks horrible on mobile, etc.
An standard protocol, and a standard app, is good for the people who just wants to communicate something with someone; may be hackers doesn’t get it, but I’m happy some like moxie does.
Of course people want to use these things with their phone. That's kind of 99.999% of the point. Apple and Goog have shown they control what the general population runs on their phone. Any doubt about their ability and willingness to unilaterally enforce that without due process and without even a full and thorough justification at a moment's notice has been removed along with parler from the app/play store. The sudden change in censorship stand in line with the democrats views happened exactly when it became clear the democrats were going to have control.
They're coming for signal and will use domestic terrorism as the wrapping paper. There might be also some "think of the children" and "Isis terrorism" involved so be sure to be ready to be accused of being a sympathiser white supremacist, islamic terrorist, pedo is if you like your messaging private /because/ you /must/ have something to hide! (From people who work at a building that celebrates J. Edgar Hoover - how could you want to hide anything from them?)
Chat is still in its infancy as a technology. We are still trying to figure things out: what's the minimal necessary feature set? What should a server API provide to clients?
And a myriad of behavior/feature/privacy questions that different messaging systems handle differently, for example: what happens when I leave a group chat - should others see me leaving? Can I leave quietly? Should I have a choice?
Or: when I join a group, do I get access to the entire message history? Or: what happens when I block someone and then later message them - should the message history be restored? This and many other privacy related problems are handled in as many ways as there are messaging systems in wide use.
Let alone handling of audio and video calls.
Messaging and its feature set should stabilize as a standard way of communication before we can say to everyone: OK so now there's no reason you shouldn't use a standard protocol. If you don't, you are definitely a bad guy. Today though it's still not easy to make a case for standardization, in my opinion.
The reality is that all of these systems, including email, tend towards becoming walled gardens. Otherwise you end up with the same problem that email has which is that a huge percentage of it is spam. At this point email is basically a few connected walled gardens from the major providers. Before that the amount of spam was even larger.
As with mail desktop app interfaces, chat-window design patterns have solidified on handhelds.
I read about Beeper and am eager to learn about its inner workings, but what about platform support that the messenger Apps can open up to?
So, even if you believe Matrix is the future and Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram have a drastic flaw, we couldn't get here without them.
Matrix addresses the theoretically interesting issue of distributed chatrooms, which makes the protocol and its implementation very complex and inefficient… while not adding much in practice (that's only my opinion, but I think this self-inflicted complexity has done nothing but a disservice to Matrix)
This is so hard to overcome. Many problems have technical solutions, but are still almost impossible to implement due to all sorts of other obstacles.
Am I supposed to see which of my friends are on it? I see none at the moment, and one of the main things that told me that Signal was gonna happen was when I started to get notifications about yet another non techie friend getting on it.
Gee I don't know, maybe standardisation has some sort of benefit that leads to a cohesive, consistent experience for all users as opposed to having a bunch of clients that all implement varying levels of the spec to various standards...
Supporting only one application is quite the opposite of standardization, it is vendor lock in. If it was standardized it would open up the opportunity to have more than one client.