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Comment by cassepipe | Hacker News Reader

The reason why Signal is not an open protocol like email has been argumented by Signal creator Moxie before (can't find the article please help). It has pros (evolution is faster and thus it's easier to compete with proprietary solutions) and cons (single point of failure) and Signal devs are well aware of that. We should stop acting like Matrix and Signal are competing with each other. I happily use Matrix but my grandma will not, ever, not in this world. And my mother has a hard time figuring out what a browser is. If we want everyone to be somewhat protected, adoption cost must be lowest.

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The problem with statements like "I happily use Matrix but my grandma will not, ever, not in this world" is that Matrix is more of a protocol than anything. So of course, your gradma would never use HTTP, but since browsers are now user friendly enough, everyone is using HTTP indirectly. Same can (will? Might?) happen with Matrix, where a popular applications get written on top of Matrix, and users don't even need to know about Matrix, just that stuff works. And when they move to another client, they can bring everything with them and stuff keeps working automatically.

> Same can (will? Might?) happen with Matrix

When will this happen, if ever?

Well, no one knows when a new popular app appears, gain traction and how it looks like, otherwise we'd all be rich by now!

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.

And when a popular application get written, it will become the next walled garden.

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.

Whatsapp got bought by Facebook which changed their strategy 100%. They used to ask users for a $1/year payment or something like that, but after being bought by Facebook, they now focus on just providing data to Facebook. I think one of the founders also have openly gone out and regretted the sale to Facebook - "At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. I live with that every day." - https://www.fastcompany.com/90242892/whatsapp-cofounder-expl...

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.

So the plan is to keep on creating new protocols so that there's frequent, although not constant, stream of services that are already user-friendly, but not optimized for milking data yet?

This doesn't strike me as a 'solution'.

Not unless you misunderstand how protocols work.

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.

Barely any one paid the $1/year. My estimation from looking into this before is less than 2% of Android users ever paid. At most half of iPhone users paid $1 as whatsapp would switch between free or paid to get it.

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.

That's not how Matrix works. Please don't spread FUD.

There are measures we can take: provider and implementation diversity should curb this. Not everyone is "grandma" so not everyone needs to use a client for "grandma".

I wrote about this in detail: https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html

We need to move beyond being saddened by the nature of systems. It's like being sad about gravity, evolution, or the speed of light. Network effects, social/cultural-scale and emergent behavior are the same.

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.

The problem is that it doesn't keep working automatically, because federated servers are in practice a hot mess of mismatched versioning and application support.

Moxie's argument can be found in its essay "the ecosystem is moving"[1], which is highly fallacious. Moxie's Signal is about control and building for himself the same kind of monopoly as others currently enjoy. You can find evidence of that through the libresignal issue tracker on GitHub where he rationalizes barring access to 3rd party clients or servers[2].

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...

Your link [1] is actually the answer to/against moxie by Daniel Gultsch. Please be fair and first give the original article so people can make up their own mind:

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...

> Your link [1] is actually the answer to/against moxie by Daniel Gultsch.

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.

> 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.

[0]: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881

Also, for what's worth, my grandma uses XMPP just fine...

Also, "grandma" is an annoying cliche/placeholder. No law says that young males understand any kind of app or sign-up process immediately.

I am literally talking about my grandma though. All of the other grand parents are dead. Young people (wether male or female) that have had access to a computer are generally more familiar with tools they grew up with which was my point. A lot of people, not even just old people, are not ready to spend more than one second when something does not work and will just switch to what they heard was working. Consider someone who does not know the difference between an OS and a browser, between 5G internet and WiFi etc. Having those people in mind matters when thinking about mass adoption (which is the goal when your target is mass surveillance by big gov).

And yet look at the demographics of any service/app that has a slightly more complicated sign-up process.

Put any barrier between young males and their porn and your pet theory will crash down

> Signal is not an open protocol

It is an open protocol, it is not a federated protocol.

Standard vs non Standard is often, but not always, the same as Federated vs Closed.

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.

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