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I think what’s needed is an open chat protocol that also works well in mobile settings, since that’s where a huge chunk of the potential user base is these days
by cpach 11y ago
I think what’s needed is an open chat protocol that also works well in mobile settings, since that’s where a huge chunk of the potential user base is these days.
- outside1234 11y agoYou think Facebook would use it? You are an optimist. (Not singling Facebook out -- there have been lots of open standards and every chat platform has moved away from them.)
- cpach 11y agoNo, I’m afraid they wouldn’t. That’s also a big part of the problem. What’s the incentive for a large player like FB to use an open chat protocol? Not much, it seems :-/
- dsp1234 11y agoIt's a pretty common pattern. When you're small, you have no users, and need to start gathering network effects. So you champion and implement protocols that allow you to interoperate with other networks. You start to eat other companies lunches as you provide a better product. As you get larger, that same interoperability starts to become a liability as other networks start eating in to your userbase. So you cut out interoperability and start building a walled garden.
- debaserab2 11y agoThat's one thing that I worry about, though. The superior product experience is coming from new centralized services such as Slack and Discord. It's not coming from those building something decentralized.
- vinnyp 11y agoUX always wins. Build a great "open" UX and you have a chance to gain traction. A bottoms up approach where we put the protocol first instead of experience is the "Architect Astronaut" way of looking at solving this problem and should be avoided - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
- herval 11y agoTelegram's protocol is built with mobile in mind: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto https://core.telegram.org/mtproto - I believe their implementation of server-side is closed-source, but remember seeing an open-source version somewhere on GitHub...?
- jeffasinger 11y agoI don't think this is enough, because it assumes that all clients are connected to the same server. What we need is something federated (like XMPP) and with a design that is reasonable for mobile.
- gst 11y agohttps://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ looks promising and like a potential XMPP successor.
- robbiemitchell 11y agoWhat's needed are a bunch of users using the protocol.