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People who care more about convenience than freedom and privacy can and do use Skype, iMessage, and Snapchat. If you give up freedom and privacy to make a more

by rvern 10y ago

People who care more about convenience than freedom and privacy can and do use Skype, iMessage, and Snapchat. If you give up freedom and privacy to make a more convenient client, you're not improving the freedom and privacy situation, you're just making more of the miserable proprietary software that we're trying to get away from. If it's not free software, you have neither freedom nor privacy. If it's not decentralized or federated, you have neither freedom nor privacy. The only contenders for freedom and privacy are XMPP and Matrix. All the others are contenders for money and popularity, but not for freedom and privacy. Popularity and money are useful and not inherently incompatible with freedom and privacy, but they are secondary. Creating a new application that is not federated or decentralized does not help, no matter how much more popular or convenient it is.

rjeli 10y ago
I was under the impression iMessage has end-to-end encryption?
- Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
  Yes, but there is no way to verify fingerprints, so trust is still very much client/server based.
kelnos 10y ago
Except that messaging services are useless if the people you want to talk to don't use them. If all the people you want to talk to share your prioritization of freedom & privacy above everything else, then you're probably ok using a federated, self-run XMPP style messaging system. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people, that just isn't the case. I would love it if I could use XMPP-based services to talk to everyone I care to talk to, but, in practice, I use 8 different messaging services, and all of them are walled-garden non-XMPP services. In the end, the people I know who care about privacy and security communicate with me using Signal (can count that number on one hand), and the rest use one of the others. You can say and wish all you want that popularity and money are secondary, but in the world we actually live in, they're #1. I expect that won't change until and unless something horrible happens and "regular people" have their privacy compromised in a way that causes them real, tangible, extreme harm.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > Except that messaging services are useless if the people you want to talk to don't use them. This applies to centralised/proprietary systems as well, including those 8 walled gardens that you use. When Slack was created, nobody was using it. When Signal came out, nobody was using it. Same with Telegram, Skype, Twitter and all the other centralised/proprietary systems. Some of those did manage to gain enough users for positive network effects to kick in, so "nobody uses it" isn't specific to FOSS/decentralised/federated systems, it applies to messaging systems in general. The fact that so many messaging systems keep being created, and so many users hop from one to another, shows that it's not a particularly strong argument either. The real problems for systems like XMPP are the levels of investment required in marketing, UI design, etc. to compete with the proprietary systems.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    Right, I think the point I was -- poorly -- trying to make is that your average user doesn't care about federation (or openness). It comes down to which service has the best marketing and can capture the most market share.

by rvern 10y ago

rjeli 10y ago

I was under the impression iMessage has end-to-end encryption?

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
Yes, but there is no way to verify fingerprints, so trust is still very much client/server based.

kelnos 10y ago

Except that messaging services are useless if the people you want to talk to don't use them. If all the people you want to talk to share your prioritization of freedom & privacy above everything else, then you're probably ok using a federated, self-run XMPP style messaging system. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people, that just isn't the case. I would love it if I could use XMPP-based services to talk to everyone I care to talk to, but, in practice, I use 8 different messaging services, and all of them are walled-garden non-XMPP services. In the end, the people I know who care about privacy and security communicate with me using Signal (can count that number on one hand), and the rest use one of the others. You can say and wish all you want that popularity and money are secondary, but in the world we actually live in, they're #1. I expect that won't change until and unless something horrible happens and "regular people" have their privacy compromised in a way that causes them real, tangible, extreme harm.

chriswarbo 10y ago
> Except that messaging services are useless if the people you want to talk to don't use them. This applies to centralised/proprietary systems as well, including those 8 walled gardens that you use. When Slack was created, nobody was using it. When Signal came out, nobody was using it. Same with Telegram, Skype, Twitter and all the other centralised/proprietary systems. Some of those did manage to gain enough users for positive network effects to kick in, so "nobody uses it" isn't specific to FOSS/decentralised/federated systems, it applies to messaging systems in general. The fact that so many messaging systems keep being created, and so many users hop from one to another, shows that it's not a particularly strong argument either. The real problems for systems like XMPP are the levels of investment required in marketing, UI design, etc. to compete with the proprietary systems.
- kelnos 10y ago
  Right, I think the point I was -- poorly -- trying to make is that your average user doesn't care about federation (or openness). It comes down to which service has the best marketing and can capture the most market share.