https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-d...
This would solve it. Then you could simply use a single app.
This is a political thing. So, vote for it, talk to the politicians.
We had similar issues in the late 90s / early 2000s with ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Chat, etc..
Apps like https://www.pidgin.im/ existed to let you check everything within 1 app because all of these apps spoke the same protocol or close enough that things mostly worked.
It's one thing to allow independent applications to use the protocol and service, like Pidgin and others. And also many services did not like this and repeatedly changed their proprietary custom protocol to make this difficult.
It's another thing to be interoperable between services. Then you could continue to use only one service but still be able to talk to people on other services.
I'm not sure how they plan to make things fully interoperable. Wouldn't that mean every chat app would need a complete chat history for every user multiplied by every chat app out there? Or instead they introduce a shared parent company / govt. entity where all chat messages are sent through, stored and pushed to users. Time to bust out the tin foil hats!
The EU law linked does not actually recommend anything specifically, just vaguely states interoperability being a goal.
Certain apps will have certain functionality. Unless you're willing to constrain the functionality it's not really possible.
Right now everyone could already use email which supports encryption. They don't, though.
Doesn't the matrix chat app allow for this? Might be useful to learn how they do it if this is of interest.
https://matrix.org/docs/guides/end-to-end-encryption-impleme...
To be sure, interoperability requires a suitable spec for other clients to implement, but there’s absolutely nothing special about end-to-end encryption in this picture—it’s just a feature to implement like any other.
Can you give an example of a "new feature" that you think would be stymied by this?
> how would it work with group chats where you can add and remove people arbitrarily?
I don't quite understand what issue you're pointing to. I'm not sure if you're unsure of how e2e encryption works or something else. Can you ask your question again with more specificity?
Haven’t kept up to date with matrix - does it even allow e2ee with group chats using a bridge?
Also, if you want to make a "send money" feature, why would it being interoperable preclude you from doing it? Bank transfers are already interoperable, why can't a send money feature be?
> e2ee with group chats
See: https://interoperability.news/2022/03/end-to-end-encrypted-g...
1. Everyone has the same basic functionality, you can switch between browsers and (mostly) everything works the same way, renders the same way and so on
2. Browser XYZ decides they want a cool feature where they expose data from a fingerprint reader as a JS API
3. Browser XYZ implements said feature and sees if websites starts using it.
4. Standards-bodies might start noticing that the feature was implemented in Browser XYZ and keeps an eye on it
5. If a second browser implements a similar/the same feature (although slightly different API or other incompatibility), standards bodies starts working on creating a standard for said feature, together with Browser XYZ and the others who participate in the standards organization
6. Once standard is done, reviewed and published, the browsers who want to have the feature go back and adjust/add/remove things until they comply with the standard.
Obviously, it's not exactly like this, but the process is more or less like this.
It's not hard to imagine the same for messaging services. The base-layer is that everyone can send text messages to everyone. This we can all agree on, so a standard would be for that first.
Then if some messaging service wants to add a new feature, they start working on that and deploying it for their service. If a second messaging service deploys the same feature, standard bodies should work on getting a interoperable model of that feature, that then all messaging services can use and hence work across all of them.
Not sure that’s the model to follow. Fundamentally though chat is different - where would the messages be stored for example? Who will guarantee deliver ability?
Email is federated and has all of these things but sucks and so everyone made their own thing. I’ve yet to see evidence this just wouldn’t regress to email again
Is that because Safari doesn't implement everything decided by the standards bodies or because Chrome deploys their own features? Probably a mix of both, but eventually there is a convergence.
Things work surprisingly well in modern times. I'm not sure when you started using the web, but back in the 90s/early 00s, the situation was a lot worse then it was today, and the browser standards are probably the biggest collaborative achievement between corporate entities in the modern web-driven world.
> Not sure that’s the model to follow. Fundamentally though chat is different - where would the messages be stored for example? Who will guarantee deliver ability?
It might seem fundamentally different on the surface, but I think not. Just like the browsers doesn't handle where the resources it loads are coming from, messaging services can be the same way. Think IRC, or even your own example, email. As long as there is a user-agent where services look consistent, the situation would be drastically improved.
> Email is federated and has all of these things but sucks and so everyone made their own thing. I’ve yet to see evidence this just wouldn’t regress to email again
Email is another great example of a success when it comes to this. Yes, email has it's warts, but you can essentially sign up for any provider, or even create your own, and receive/send emails to any of the others ones.
I don't see "email" as a regression compared the IM situation we have today. Imagine you would need a gmail account to send emails to gmail users, yahoo account to send emails to yahoo users. That would be awful! But you're right that email could be a lot better, but still, I prefer it to the alternatives from the IM world.
Did I miss the campaign to define SQL? Of the one to specify the x86 ISA? Perhaps they should merge the arm and x86 architectures, they're both CPUs right?
This feels very far away from a 'political thing'.
Regulation is hard. This doesn't mean that rules shouldn't exist.
Should they mandate that video game platforms be interoperable? What about mandating that every company produces apps that interoperate with windows Mac Linux and mobile.
But wouldn't it be nice? Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, all together? Or always cross platform apps? Is there any real benefit for the user that they are not interoperable?
Ubitiquious cross platform apps, sure! Just 3x your development team size - will your app still make sense to make with those costs? Oh don't worry - just replatform to a cross platform toolkit (and stop working on new features for 6-12months and retrain the entire team).
I just don't see why it's worth bringing the blunt hammer of government intervention here - let alone a reasonable path for regulation implementation.