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Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

cough XMPP federation cough

Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited decades for iMessage to get Android support which only happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger, WeChat, etc.

Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed systems we’ll ever see. There are just too many incentives to build walled gardens instead.

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I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden. It's always going to be more expensive to try to work with those who don't work with you.

Going the self-host route, I'd still want a service of some sort so I didn't have to maintain it myself. Almost like an evergreen program that self-hosts my data and synchronizes and backups and transfers anything and everything.

Everything would be accessible outside of the program as local human readable or viewable files where possible. That'd be the best way to be non-walled garden.

> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden.

I've had several email providers die since the 1980s. Each time it was a major disruption in my life. The last time, I coped by mostly dispensing with email whenever possible. Like most people I have a "good" email address for important things, that I check weekly, and a "garbage" email address I only bother to check when I have a need to.

Hosting my own mail server, not subject to some provider's ideas of filtering, or simply vanishing in the night, would make email more attractive. But the festering mess that SMTP email evolved into isn't just something you can set up in an evening. It's not even a hobby. It looks pretty much like at least a part-time job. Weighing the options, I don't really need email that badly.

> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden.

If only one entity does it, as far as I can imagine it is only a marketing statement to appeal to a niche demographic - people who care about it from an ideological standpoint.

If more than one entity does it, it could lower the bar for critical mass. Instead of having to get enough people on your platform to start benefiting from the network effect, you only have to get enough people on your platform and platforms that you have bidirectional integration with.

It's actually fascinating to see the re-emergence of "vines" but as parts of other apps. With the explosion of Tiktok, every platform decided to make their own version - YouTube Shorts, Facebook/Instagram Reels, etc.

Really, a format should be created (e.g. file.[short|vine], etc.) that could be then edited by any editor and viewed by any viewer, and all that you'd need to do to copy a YT short to a facebook reel is to copy the file itself to each platform.

It's literally the same exact concept over and over again, just wall gardened instead. So much wasted development time doing the exact same thing.

Does this give credence to cryptoeconomics?

Exactly. GChat supported federation at the start, but they removed it later due to spam and other challenges [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795658

matrix.org has entered the chat

XMPP doesn't even support E2E encryption out of the box. It's as outmoded as IRC.

Lots of XMPP clients support E2EE/OMEMO out of the box now. If you think XMPP is outmoded you should try it again some time. I recommend Conversations on Android.

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