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Comment by Illotus | Hacker News Reader

This would basically guarantee that regulators would inevitably separate either Youtube or Chrome from Google.

I'd love to believe this, but said regulators don't seem particularly energetic these days.

In the EU they are. Soon, chat apps are required to be able to connect to each other, thanks to the EU. Telegram <----> Signal <----> WhatsApp

Freedom for the people instead of companies! That's why I prefer the EU over the US.

> Telegram <----> Signal <----> WhatsApp

More like Telegram (non E2EE modes)<---->Discord<---->Guilded and Signal<---->Telegram (E2EE modes)<---->WhatsApp.

This isn't going to happen. It's not a good idea generally. It doesn't bring "freedom for the people" but instead completely undermines it. Such integration would break the security of Signal, rendering its existence moot.

Take a few minutes to think about how it would have to be implemented on a technical level.

I'm not sure I understand? all three of those apps are end-to-end encrypted. Surely the recipient's phone has the key to decode and the company does not?

Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted.

First of all, Telegram is not end to end encrypted. It has limited support for end to end encryption of direct messages only. There is zero support for E2E of groups, and zero support for E2E in a multiclient context, which makes the feature almost completely useless, and indeed, almost nobody uses it and I don't think even 1% of telegram users have ever used it or even know how to use it.

Integrating either Signal or WhatsApp clients with Telegram would to tantamount to a backdoor, or would require a redesign of Telegram so drastic that would upset its users. A perfect analogy is integrating WhatsApp and Twitter because Telegram is actually more similar to Twitter than it is to WhatsApp.

But even integrating Signal and WhatsApp which now share a similar encryption scheme and user ID isn't a good idea: Most Signal users don't want any interaction either directly or indirectly with WhatsApp. The two programs have completely different group implementations: WhatsApp keeps all the metadata server side, whereas Signal handles all of that client side with the server acting as a dumb router of opaque messages that wrap the group state updates. How would those two systems be reconciled? Would Signal have to accept WhatsApp users joining its group and then just leak all of the group metadata to WhatsApp servers for compatibility? Would WhatsApp have to re-write its entire service to be compatible with Signal's group semantics and see to it that all billion users are fully upgraded or kick them off the service?

These issues go on and on and on, and they increase exponentially the more messaging systems you try to add. The whole idea is just ridiculous.

Signal would have to create a fake user for every integrated Whatsapp/Telegram user, and the client would have to create an e2e key pair. Signal's zero knowledge policy doesn't need to be compromised in order to achieve that. Hopefully it would be possible to opt out of the integrations.

It's not that simple. What do you do when a Signal user creates a group with members using Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram?

"Sorry, group chat functionality with external users is not supported".

Yeah, so not really interoperable.

This was why XMPP failed. The UX was terrible because different clients didn't support the same features broadly and it was a big mess. And everyone just went with centralized services where everything works as expected.

Which would be illegal.

Wait wait what? can you elaborate?

I'd love to get back to the halcyon days of the late 90's where I could use whatever client I wanted to talk to people.

The best way to get there is to support Matrix then. I have elaborated in sibling comments on why trying to have the government force the existing systems to be compatible is a terrible, terrible idea.

They don't have to explicitly require that of communications services. Just write interoperability into law and the problem goes away.

The reason they don't work with each other is there's a line in the terms of service that says you can't use anything but their official software to interact with their servers. WhatsApp will literally ban your number forevef if it detects this. That's the root cause of the shittiness of apps. They very much want you locked in and forced to use their shitty proprietary software. If society makes such terms illegal and unenforceable, free software clients will start showing up and other companies will start integrating with their competitors whether they like it or not. This will also fix all other apps of any kind, including social media apps. It will kill things like remote attestation and web environment integrity. It will just fix everything.

Third-party clients are great and I agree that the ability to use them should be enforced by law. But really, that's not enough - I don't want accounts on numerous different networks just because one group of friends is here and another is there and the school is using that one etc. Once you are at a certain size, you should be required to federate with the one official chat network.

Why? I don't want into any "official chat network". I despise whatsapp and its success in Europe is a testament to the lacking class, culture and taste of its clueless inhabitants.

I would doubt it. Websites are essentially software distributed on demand, there is no requirement to distribute your software for any particular platform (browser).

If Apple can make their software (i.e. Final Cut or Logic) exclusive to Apple devices, so can Google.

You have heard of anti-trust regulations, yes?

Is there some fine print saying "but Apple can"?

Yes, the part where the legislation looks at the market share and impact of the corporation in question.

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