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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> highlights the risks associated with the centralization of instant messaging services

That seems to be the takeaway.

Centralization of just about anything is an issue, not just messaging.

However, users still want/need the kinds of advantages that we get from monopolies/centralization, and implementing them in distributed systems is really hard.

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I wonder if there was ever a path for solving this early, like, we made email and that proliferated, if only we'd landed on better identity management first, would we be in some digital messaging utopia.

Would the world be better if we'd been saying "whats your public key?" instead of "whats your email?" in the 90s?

I think tech companies would've eventually attempted to build some walls around that and monetise it. Regardless of technology, the challenge is someone wants to "take this to the next level" - as long as it's investor driven, it remains "open" only as long as that brings more money or community good will

The public keys won't be stable as we would need to rotate them. We need both a stable identity and a proof of that identity. Security is not very user friendly and would have made the digital tech even more fringe. One of the reasons email and web took off was its comparative ease of use.

For messaging i think early skype had it sorted more or less , decentralised - widely used and intuitive identity. If it had been allowed to evolve identity maybe like email(matrix or even bsky) got federated with custom servers/identities and handles that could still interoperate, would be nice. Instead MS bought it and ran it into the ground.

I wonder what happened to Mozilla Persona.

That was super nice.

Maybe, but, in practice, email has been basically centralized too. For most people, it's just too convenient to get a gmail account for free, and forget about any maintenance headache.

But that only started when gmail launched with a deal that was too good to refuse (a mailbox that was huge for the time, and grew bigger over time). Before that most people just used the free email account they got from their ISP. That also comes without maintenance headache for the user and is at least somewhat less centralized

Yeah but you change your ISP more often (pricing reasons, moving to a different state or country) than your email provider.

Damn, in the last twenty years I've never lived at a place with more than one option for ISP (excluding satellite options).

https://simplex.chat/ Seems to take security and decentralization pretty far while keeping it convenient enough.

I have more confidence in Meta than the government.

I mean this as expression of technical feasibility and capability to achieve risk reduction with technical measures in an adequate amount of time.

Remember, that for the rest of the non-technical units out there the “digitization” and “IT implementation projects” fail on a massive scale.

Shit in shit out.

Whatever we trash FAANG for, any government has way more blowout.

You trust it more than your government. Which stands to reason at the moment if you are in the US. But there are competent, more trustworthy governments in other parts of the world. And other companies people might trust more than Meta.

Decentralization allows people to choose who they trust. Or rather requires them to really

> You trust it more than your government. Which stands to reason at the moment if you are in the US.

No, it really doesn't, and not because I have any faith in the current US government, just because I've seen the way Meta relates to it.

just read the matrix thread on hn homepage.

yeah

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