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Comment by Zash | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the key is network effect and enough marketing to bootstrap it?

It doesn't look like Matrix has reached the point where there is any significant network effect. What I'm saying is that they are building a product, and the protocol is just one component of that product.

The key to interoperability is agreeing on standards. XMPP being about creating a proper Internet Standard and not a product is what made me choose XMPP over Matrix (also simplicity).

Not losing messages is pretty key too. But yeah, given enough marketing you can pull anything off. WhatsApp basically doesn't support multi device to this day and is more popular than either (free) XMPP or Matrix could ever hope to be. There's a web version but it only works if your phone is connected. So I guess the phone acts as a server then? Does that mean they found it easier to set it up like that than to make xmpp (which WhatsApp is said to be based on) reliable with multiple devices?

That is not true anymore. The latest version of WhatsApp Web can be used without your phone connected. Not sure if it is rolled out globally for everyone yet, as it was fairly recent for me (couple days now).

XMPP working on multiple devices is a problem long solved. Not losing messaging is a solved problem too. I can schedule you a demo if you wish.

It is not a long solved problem if it takes a demo to prove. If it were long solved it'd be self evident. This argument wouldn't exist to begin with.

A demo is worthless if experience doesn't prove it in the long run. And I have the latter, and it doesn't prove. Yes, I know it's probably me, or more likely my friends doing something wrong. One of them restricted Conversations from running in the background for example, non-techies do all sorts of silly stuff. But then again, it shouldn't break with non-techies either. Nothing breaks with them aside from XMPP. Not even WhatsApp which is based on XMPP afaik

While being "techy" I too restrict Conversations from running in background. Moreover, it's annoying and dangerous to keep XMPP running (reconnecting, giving out your metadata) while roaming over different networks, so I'm killing it myself. But, aside from tremendously, ridiculously bad UI concept, I find Conversations to be one of the most reliable OMEMO-enables jabber clients for Android.

What metadata do you believe it is giving out?.. And how it could possibly even be comparable to what an android espionage device gives out by itself in the first place

WhatsApp first penetrated countries where people's primary computing devices are phones, and they maybe don't even own PCs. It's not surprising that it became super popular despite its lack of multi-device support (at least until recently). Wasn't just marketing.

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