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I understand why slack is popular, I use it. But Slack's success is it's UI, and that is not dependent on a centralized close protocol. We could have a rich ec

I understand why slack is popular, I use it. But Slack's success is it's UI, and that is not dependent on a centralized close protocol. We could have a rich ecosystem of competing chat clients over a distributed messaging bus, it's just that there's no economic viability in it. If SMTP were re-invented today, it would never be open and federated.

wodenokoto 11y ago
A big part of a good chat UI is the knowledge of how things looks in the other end. Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.
- 1stop 11y ago
  ... Did you just make that up? Slack could still have an awesome UX and be open, people would use it out of choice because it has the best UX.
  - oddvar 11y ago
    I agree. We're building https://matrix.org https://matrix.org (a free and open communication protocol) and we've realised that until we have a client with better UX than proprietary offerings, people just won't switch. We hope that a Matrix-enabled client (https://vector.im https://vector.im is looking promising) will get the UI/UX right - and thus actually offer an open and free solution where you can run your own server (should you choose) and own and control your own data!
    - lewisl9029 11y ago
      Wow. Vector is progressing along quite nicely! This new build has none of the rough edges that I remember from the last time I saw it. Congrats to the team for the awesome work! My biggest issue with Matrix still has to do with its privacy properties though. Homeservers simply know too much about their users. End to end encryption from clients to homeservers appears to be optional in Matrix (and even with e2e encryption, metadata will still be fully exposed to homeservers), and message histories are stored in plaintext at rest. Now, this probably won't be a huge problem in the ideal scenario where the Matrix network would be composed of a large number of small independent homeservers, but history has shown that decentralized systems that aren't fully decentralized tend to eventually converge towards centralization as it becomes more popular (just look at what happened to email). And in a world where Google, Facebook and Microsoft's homeservers might eventually have a combined market share of over 90%, the privacy aspects of Matrix leave a lot to be desired.
      - filterfish 11y ago
        Yeah, it's pretty usable now. We moved from slack to matrix/vector about three months ago. The only complaint was text formatting and that has been fixed now.
  - wdmeldon 11y ago
    Not OP but my girlfriend and I are long distance and the 6.0.1 update for Android is causing serious strain on our relationship. I keep sending her taco emojis but all she sees are little boxes with x's in them. If Samsung doesn't push this update to Galaxy 6S soon, I don't know how much longer we'll be together...
    - OJFord 11y ago
      Not your girlfriend but I thought I was receiving "envelope face"s.
- Killswitch 11y ago
  > Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones. What's sad is that's so true. I overheard the other day my 13 year old niece saying she didn't like a certain girl hanging out with them anymore, because she's the only one "with green chat bubble". Yes. They excluded a girl from their group, because she didn't have a blue chat bubble. (Essentially an iPhone).

wodenokoto 11y ago

A big part of a good chat UI is the knowledge of how things looks in the other end. Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.

1stop 11y ago
... Did you just make that up? Slack could still have an awesome UX and be open, people would use it out of choice because it has the best UX.
- oddvar 11y ago
  I agree. We're building https://matrix.org https://matrix.org (a free and open communication protocol) and we've realised that until we have a client with better UX than proprietary offerings, people just won't switch. We hope that a Matrix-enabled client (https://vector.im https://vector.im is looking promising) will get the UI/UX right - and thus actually offer an open and free solution where you can run your own server (should you choose) and own and control your own data!
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    Wow. Vector is progressing along quite nicely! This new build has none of the rough edges that I remember from the last time I saw it. Congrats to the team for the awesome work! My biggest issue with Matrix still has to do with its privacy properties though. Homeservers simply know too much about their users. End to end encryption from clients to homeservers appears to be optional in Matrix (and even with e2e encryption, metadata will still be fully exposed to homeservers), and message histories are stored in plaintext at rest. Now, this probably won't be a huge problem in the ideal scenario where the Matrix network would be composed of a large number of small independent homeservers, but history has shown that decentralized systems that aren't fully decentralized tend to eventually converge towards centralization as it becomes more popular (just look at what happened to email). And in a world where Google, Facebook and Microsoft's homeservers might eventually have a combined market share of over 90%, the privacy aspects of Matrix leave a lot to be desired.
    - filterfish 11y ago
      Yeah, it's pretty usable now. We moved from slack to matrix/vector about three months ago. The only complaint was text formatting and that has been fixed now.
- wdmeldon 11y ago
  Not OP but my girlfriend and I are long distance and the 6.0.1 update for Android is causing serious strain on our relationship. I keep sending her taco emojis but all she sees are little boxes with x's in them. If Samsung doesn't push this update to Galaxy 6S soon, I don't know how much longer we'll be together...
  - OJFord 11y ago
    Not your girlfriend but I thought I was receiving "envelope face"s.
Killswitch 11y ago
> Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones. What's sad is that's so true. I overheard the other day my 13 year old niece saying she didn't like a certain girl hanging out with them anymore, because she's the only one "with green chat bubble". Yes. They excluded a girl from their group, because she didn't have a blue chat bubble. (Essentially an iPhone).