10 ms·

I'm a bit annoyed at "we can do better than X" when, you know what? Maybe we can't. Yes, it's nice that you and I can install Element and deal with the finicky

I'm a bit annoyed at "we can do better than X" when, you know what? Maybe we can't. Yes, it's nice that you and I can install Element and deal with the finicky crypto handshake that for some reason always shows red for me because a friend opened the web UI and closed it before he completed the handshake and now we can never actually make that check go green, and it's nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.host went down one day with all my toots without a word from the administrator, and yeah I know I should have picked a better host (though if you could predict that mastodon.host will die why didn't you tell me?), but my mom can't. Users value their convenience, and security and privacy are inconvenient. Hell, we started decentralized and over email and newsgroups and personal websites and blogs and it's all Facebook Facebook Facebook now that the Eternal September came around. If we could do better, we would have done better by now.

xrisk 6y ago
> If we could do better, we would have done better by now. We should have given up on Linux UIs way back then. They're still garbage when it compares to the alternatives.
tomphoolery 6y ago
It turns out that decentralization closes the door on top-down censorship, but at the same time, invites spam and abuse of the system for personal gain. It's very easy to do this in a decentralized model, and every single decentralized service suffers from this. IRC, Email, Mastodon, you name it. It's all bad.
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  The solution is simple. Make the decentralized systems social, with reputation.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    How do you prevent bots giving each other reputation?
    - wyager 6y ago
      Some strategies: Make reputation scores the result of some sort of eigendecomposition-based algorithm (similar to PageRank) where the initial state vector is based on the people you trust. That way, you’ll only give credence to a bot to whatever degree you (indirectly) trust the bot. Implement Sybil resistance with a combination of verifiable cost and blacklisting. Make it cost real verifiable resources to create an identity (hashcash or Bitcoin burning or something) and then have a system for blacklisting fake IDs.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        > Make reputation scores the result of some sort of eigendecomposition-based algorithm (similar to PageRank) where the initial state vector is based on the people you trust. That way, you’ll only give credence to a bot to whatever degree you (indirectly) trust the bot. This is just 'web of trust', right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      By punishing their connections when they misbehave. Or at least, that's how you make it not matter. If spam-bot hands out reputation to spim-bot and then you get a bunch of garbage from spim-bot, derate everything coming from anyone that has given either of them reputation (and perhaps ignore their attestations also).
      - walls 6y ago
        Now what happens when spam is done through a compromised user, or when the user acts human and has real interactions before spamming?
        maxerickson 6y ago
        I suppose it depends on the details quite a lot. But fundamentally, it isn't particularly harmful to just burn a user that starts spamming. If a compromised account is recovered, it's fine if they have to restore communication out of band, if it isn't recovered it's fine that it is burned.
  - asutekku 6y ago
    And that then is extremely easy to abuse as soon as you have enough people with high rank enough deciding to start to misbehave.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - colordrops 6y ago
      Sounds like IRL
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Turns out most problems are people problems, not tech problems. Tech is just how the symptoms present.
    - CuriouslyC 6y ago
      If everything revolves around people I give authority to (my "friends") then any attempt to game my feed is going to result in a swift defriend. Problem solved.
    - Sunspark 6y ago
      It even happens in the real world too. I remember one guy who had been on eBay or something for years working up a huge positive karma, and then one day a switch flipped and he disappeared with everyone's money and was never seen again.
  - michelb 6y ago
    “If you like my post I will like yours.” We can’t have many nice things, it’s human nature.
  - mertd 6y ago
    Will the arbiter of reputations be central or decentralized?
    - CuriouslyC 6y ago
      If each person controls the authority they provide to others (via friending, upvotes, etc) then the system can't be mass gamed, which is enough to deter most bad behavior.
  - proactivesvcs 6y ago
    I see a lot more witch hunts these days than I did 10 years ago, and most of them are as principled as the days when they were with torches and pitchforks. If I came across a system with a reputation-based feature it would be a red line I would definitely not cross.
- rasengan 6y ago
  The footnote[1] project helps to provide spam and abuse by limiting each user to 10 MB. [1] https://github.com/kyokan/footnote/ https://github.com/kyokan/footnote/
Ericson2314 6y ago
> Hell, we /started/ decentralized and over email and newsgroups and personal websites and blogs and it's all Facebook Facebook Facebook now that the Eternal September came around. We didn't do the decentralization then because of good politics and security: look how bad the other security properties were. Rather we did it because the field was new and the actors not consolidated. Creating decentralization after in a mature, consoliditated space is a completely different enterprise. In particular, a lot more attention needs to paid to inefficiency and defense against the central hegemons. It's a hard battle, but if won, will be a much more durable victory.
tombert 6y ago
I had a similar experience with Matrix/Element. I was using the desktop app to chat with a friend, and while we were able to get some end-to-end encryption working, it was a huge pain the butt, and if two software engineers struggled this much to get the damn thing working, there's no way in hell that I'm convincing my parents to use it. To me, we have to accept the incremental wins where we can get them; getting my parents on Signal means that they're not on WhatsApp. I am a believer in federation, honestly, but the fact of the matter is that there's a reason that XMPP hasn't taken the world by storm, and people have gravitated towards centralized stuff: it's just easier, and not everyone is a software engineer. That said, I would love to be wrong about this....if we can make Matrix/Element approachable by anyone, I would support that.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  I'm not worried about people that I moved to signal "grumbling" about being moved again to Matrix. If the Signal move was successful it should build confidence in future moves. The killer app for Matrix for most people won't be ability to run your own home server, but the easy generalization of Matrix to things like Reddit/HN with good integration with 1-1 chat someday will be. Also organizational usage. That of course is way cooler than Signal "not being facebook". So biding our time is fine. When the time does come, we should probably campaign for HN to be officially bridged with Matrix too :D.
  - Evidlo 6y ago
    HN won't even get dark mode, so the only way we'd ever get Matrix on HN is through a random macroscopic quantum event.
- walrus01 6y ago
  My experience with Matrix/Element and the various standard-compliant Matrix chat clients, in an ISP environment, is that it's totally possible to set up a rock solid replacement for Slack within an organization that has a person on staff to spend some cycles setting it up, and periodically maintaining it. We don't have any major technical challenges or problems running our own Synapse daemon server. It's a debian stable xen PV VM stored on a LVM logical volume, so easily moved between hypervisors, or cloned, if ever necessary. It runs at a load average of 0.01. In my specific ISP environment it's the same person that admins the X.509 private root CA PKI so we're well equipped to deal with running it in a purely intranet environment with no access to the global routing table. For widespread non technical random end user use? Totally agreed it's not ready yet.
theon144 6y ago
Which is more or less verbatim addressed in the article... "While that is somewhat true — at least by the metric of “secure messengers your granny can use”, there are some promising alternatives who are especially focused on decentralizing E2EE communications. Nobody's saying there's a better alternative already, which seems to be your main gripe. The point is that Signal's model is still imperfect, and it's worth improving upon. >If we could do better, we would have done better by now. To claim this regarding tech, of all fields? I seriously can't imagine what would have to happen to make me think that everything has already been invented, and what we've got now is the best we'll ever get.
shafyy 6y ago
Haha, I love the angry honesty in this post. That's exactly how I feel. I think it's possible that we can get the UX right for a chat app based on a decentralized protocol such as Matrix some time in the future, but that's just not the case today. And today, I'd rather have everyone using Signal instead of WhatsApp. Yes, Signal might go evil in the future, but we'll deal with it then. In the meantime let's improve our decentralized chat systems. And as this current period shows, it's absolutely possible for a lot of people to quickly switch from one social network to another.
alerighi 6y ago
Nobody thinks about it but the most professionally used communication medium is the email, and part if not all of its success if not all its success is that is decentralized. A company cannot afford to use a service that can be closed and loose all the communications. Centralized services are single point of failure, and in that regard Signal is no better than WhatsApp, because yes, in theory you can run your own server, but have you tried to do so? It's not practical or even endorsed by the Signal creators themself, since there is no way in the clients to make them connect to your server instead of the centralized one. Another bad thing of Signal is the use of a phone number as the authentication method. A phone number is not something that preserves your privacy. Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID. Another aspect in which email is just better.
- walrus01 6y ago
  > Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID another huge problem with using phone numbers as IDs, which software developers in the US/Canada often don't think about, is that in many developing nation environments there is no such thing as local number portability, or the ability to move your phone number between any of the major national-scale mobile phone network operators or VoIP providers as you wish. As you can do in the USA if you become unsatisfied with your Tmobile service and want to move to ATT, keeping your phone number. This is one of the reasons why dual (and even triple) SIM phones are so popular outside of North America. In a lot of countries I don't see number portability in the SS7/PSTN system ever becoming a political reality, due to regulatory capture on the part of the national telecom regulator. At least not before pure IP based communications and apps make the concept of a PSTN phone number irrelevant entirely.
- kd913 6y ago
  On the other hand, email is the single largest causes of cyber attacks. The communication is not E2E encrypted (apart from a few GPG/SMIME users), no forward secrecy and barely any signature checks. Even if outlook, thunderbird maybe supports it, goodluck getting all the mobile versions to support it too. The clients used to view emails suffer from the same problem with browsers so are subject to all the HTML/JS/CSS privacy attacks. I wish all companies would move to something centralized solution where communication is guaranteed to only come from those within the same service. This way Sharon from HR won't open every link, download every crypto/ransomeware. Maybe my IT could also save 150k a year by not having to send me phishing 'training' emails and instead deal with some decent forms of signature checking. Heck billions of dollars a year are wasted because of phishing, spam, crypto attacks because of email. From my perspective, email is a shitty legacy tech from 1990s that should be moved to a modern solution that enables E2E encryption or signature checks at a minimum.
randoramax 6y ago
We need to think of ways to run the various Matrix, Mastodon, peertube etc in tiny boxes in our homes! There is no real reason for not promoting self hosting. The same way i buy a small Nas or an amazon firetv stick, with apps, I would buy a small box with pihole, mastodon and matrix.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Have you tried running Mastodon and Matrix on a Pi? I'm not so confident it'd work, these aren't lean servers. I would love a tiny server I can run on my home server (for my tiny message volume), but Mastodon and Synapse are optimized for large servers.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    synapse is actually quite tiny, but its use of an sqlite db on disk and other disk-write related activities, over a long term of months or years, seems quite likely to destroy a raspberry pi microsd card in much the same way that ordinary logging will destroy a microsd card. yes the rpi4 can boot from a USB-connected 'real' sata device now, which is an improvement.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      > synapse is actually quite tiny Hmm, is it really? My server has a SSD so I don't care about writes, I just want it to be low on CPU and memory requirements.
      - walrus01 6y ago
        an entire synapse with its python environment is about 150MB of disk space occupied, before any user data starts getting written to the database. chat for a group of about twenty people runs fine on a VM with 512MB of RAM. After boot about 300MB of the system RAM is occupied by the base minimal debian OS and other daemons (snmpd, etc), leaving plenty for python3. this same machine also has a minimal nginx setup as the standard reverse proxy configuration for TLS1.2/TLS1.3 in front of the synapse daemon, which isn't set up for any crypto and only listens on localhost.
Evidlo 6y ago
These are all complaints about the app's UI, not Matrix or federated networks. > If we could do better, we would have done better by now. I'm guessing you might have said something similar about a non-profit running a massively popular chat application 5 years ago. The only pieces missing now are interoperability and community involvement.
foobiekr 6y ago
I agree with this. Even Signal is just barely this year entering in the realm of practically useable for most of my friends and family.
xurukefi 6y ago
> Users value their convenience, and security and privacy are inconvenient. True. A messenger will be widely adopted if it offers features that WhatsApp et al. don't have. And by that I don't mean security or privacy, but something that people actually care about, like the stickers in telegram for example. And then that messenger just needs to be secure without interfering with functionality, convenience or UX ... problem solved.
smolder 6y ago
I'm not so sure. It really hasn't been that long in a generational sense that the internet has been around. Society may still be in the honeymoon phase of it's relationship with the internet. If building network services was like building houses, we may not be anywhere near drywall. Who is the "we" who can't do better, just technologists? Or humanity as a whole? Is it all just a demand side problem, and the people chose centralization, or was centralization a matter of policy for some group of sufficient influence? Is it just a byproduct of unfettered capitalism? A conspiracy to make the internet less 'libre' by a powerful special interest looking to profit (or a three letter agency looking to snoop) isn't outside the realm of possibility, is it? Anyway, I guess my point is that there are a lot of different factors that got us to this moment, and as people say, change is the only constant. I don't think anyone should give up on their ideas for the future, even if they've been tried without success before in some form.
sliken 6y ago
It's not easy to do better. Sure, Moxie has has a strong opinions, but has reasoning behind it. Not distributed or federated, because then you'll inevitable version drift, complex handshakes, more attack surface, different quality implementations, more risk to users, and overall a less secure system. Requiring a sim, annoying, makes it easier to track people through whoever paid for the sim. However it does make it hard for an attacker to create millions of accounts and camp on user names.
Triv888 6y ago
Skype was good when it used to be p2p... but when Microsoft bought it, they changed how it works.

xrisk 6y ago

> If we could do better, we would have done better by now. We should have given up on Linux UIs way back then. They're still garbage when it compares to the alternatives.

tomphoolery 6y ago

It turns out that decentralization closes the door on top-down censorship, but at the same time, invites spam and abuse of the system for personal gain. It's very easy to do this in a decentralized model, and every single decentralized service suffers from this. IRC, Email, Mastodon, you name it. It's all bad.

CuriouslyC 6y ago
The solution is simple. Make the decentralized systems social, with reputation.
- lukevp 6y ago
  How do you prevent bots giving each other reputation?
  - wyager 6y ago
    Some strategies: Make reputation scores the result of some sort of eigendecomposition-based algorithm (similar to PageRank) where the initial state vector is based on the people you trust. That way, you’ll only give credence to a bot to whatever degree you (indirectly) trust the bot. Implement Sybil resistance with a combination of verifiable cost and blacklisting. Make it cost real verifiable resources to create an identity (hashcash or Bitcoin burning or something) and then have a system for blacklisting fake IDs.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > Make reputation scores the result of some sort of eigendecomposition-based algorithm (similar to PageRank) where the initial state vector is based on the people you trust. That way, you’ll only give credence to a bot to whatever degree you (indirectly) trust the bot. This is just 'web of trust', right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    By punishing their connections when they misbehave. Or at least, that's how you make it not matter. If spam-bot hands out reputation to spim-bot and then you get a bunch of garbage from spim-bot, derate everything coming from anyone that has given either of them reputation (and perhaps ignore their attestations also).
    - walls 6y ago
      Now what happens when spam is done through a compromised user, or when the user acts human and has real interactions before spamming?
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        I suppose it depends on the details quite a lot. But fundamentally, it isn't particularly harmful to just burn a user that starts spamming. If a compromised account is recovered, it's fine if they have to restore communication out of band, if it isn't recovered it's fine that it is burned.
- asutekku 6y ago
  And that then is extremely easy to abuse as soon as you have enough people with high rank enough deciding to start to misbehave.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - colordrops 6y ago
    Sounds like IRL
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Turns out most problems are people problems, not tech problems. Tech is just how the symptoms present.
  - CuriouslyC 6y ago
    If everything revolves around people I give authority to (my "friends") then any attempt to game my feed is going to result in a swift defriend. Problem solved.
  - Sunspark 6y ago
    It even happens in the real world too. I remember one guy who had been on eBay or something for years working up a huge positive karma, and then one day a switch flipped and he disappeared with everyone's money and was never seen again.
- michelb 6y ago
  “If you like my post I will like yours.” We can’t have many nice things, it’s human nature.
- mertd 6y ago
  Will the arbiter of reputations be central or decentralized?
  - CuriouslyC 6y ago
    If each person controls the authority they provide to others (via friending, upvotes, etc) then the system can't be mass gamed, which is enough to deter most bad behavior.
- proactivesvcs 6y ago
  I see a lot more witch hunts these days than I did 10 years ago, and most of them are as principled as the days when they were with torches and pitchforks. If I came across a system with a reputation-based feature it would be a red line I would definitely not cross.
rasengan 6y ago
The footnote[1] project helps to provide spam and abuse by limiting each user to 10 MB. [1] https://github.com/kyokan/footnote/ https://github.com/kyokan/footnote/

Ericson2314 6y ago

> Hell, we /started/ decentralized and over email and newsgroups and personal websites and blogs and it's all Facebook Facebook Facebook now that the Eternal September came around. We didn't do the decentralization then because of good politics and security: look how bad the other security properties were. Rather we did it because the field was new and the actors not consolidated. Creating decentralization after in a mature, consoliditated space is a completely different enterprise. In particular, a lot more attention needs to paid to inefficiency and defense against the central hegemons. It's a hard battle, but if won, will be a much more durable victory.

tombert 6y ago

I had a similar experience with Matrix/Element. I was using the desktop app to chat with a friend, and while we were able to get some end-to-end encryption working, it was a huge pain the butt, and if two software engineers struggled this much to get the damn thing working, there's no way in hell that I'm convincing my parents to use it. To me, we have to accept the incremental wins where we can get them; getting my parents on Signal means that they're not on WhatsApp. I am a believer in federation, honestly, but the fact of the matter is that there's a reason that XMPP hasn't taken the world by storm, and people have gravitated towards centralized stuff: it's just easier, and not everyone is a software engineer. That said, I would love to be wrong about this....if we can make Matrix/Element approachable by anyone, I would support that.

Ericson2314 6y ago
I'm not worried about people that I moved to signal "grumbling" about being moved again to Matrix. If the Signal move was successful it should build confidence in future moves. The killer app for Matrix for most people won't be ability to run your own home server, but the easy generalization of Matrix to things like Reddit/HN with good integration with 1-1 chat someday will be. Also organizational usage. That of course is way cooler than Signal "not being facebook". So biding our time is fine. When the time does come, we should probably campaign for HN to be officially bridged with Matrix too :D.
- Evidlo 6y ago
  HN won't even get dark mode, so the only way we'd ever get Matrix on HN is through a random macroscopic quantum event.
walrus01 6y ago
My experience with Matrix/Element and the various standard-compliant Matrix chat clients, in an ISP environment, is that it's totally possible to set up a rock solid replacement for Slack within an organization that has a person on staff to spend some cycles setting it up, and periodically maintaining it. We don't have any major technical challenges or problems running our own Synapse daemon server. It's a debian stable xen PV VM stored on a LVM logical volume, so easily moved between hypervisors, or cloned, if ever necessary. It runs at a load average of 0.01. In my specific ISP environment it's the same person that admins the X.509 private root CA PKI so we're well equipped to deal with running it in a purely intranet environment with no access to the global routing table. For widespread non technical random end user use? Totally agreed it's not ready yet.

theon144 6y ago

Which is more or less verbatim addressed in the article... "While that is somewhat true — at least by the metric of “secure messengers your granny can use”, there are some promising alternatives who are especially focused on decentralizing E2EE communications. Nobody's saying there's a better alternative already, which seems to be your main gripe. The point is that Signal's model is still imperfect, and it's worth improving upon. >If we could do better, we would have done better by now. To claim this regarding tech, of all fields? I seriously can't imagine what would have to happen to make me think that everything has already been invented, and what we've got now is the best we'll ever get.

shafyy 6y ago

Haha, I love the angry honesty in this post. That's exactly how I feel. I think it's possible that we can get the UX right for a chat app based on a decentralized protocol such as Matrix some time in the future, but that's just not the case today. And today, I'd rather have everyone using Signal instead of WhatsApp. Yes, Signal might go evil in the future, but we'll deal with it then. In the meantime let's improve our decentralized chat systems. And as this current period shows, it's absolutely possible for a lot of people to quickly switch from one social network to another.

alerighi 6y ago

Nobody thinks about it but the most professionally used communication medium is the email, and part if not all of its success if not all its success is that is decentralized. A company cannot afford to use a service that can be closed and loose all the communications. Centralized services are single point of failure, and in that regard Signal is no better than WhatsApp, because yes, in theory you can run your own server, but have you tried to do so? It's not practical or even endorsed by the Signal creators themself, since there is no way in the clients to make them connect to your server instead of the centralized one. Another bad thing of Signal is the use of a phone number as the authentication method. A phone number is not something that preserves your privacy. Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID. Another aspect in which email is just better.

walrus01 6y ago
> Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID another huge problem with using phone numbers as IDs, which software developers in the US/Canada often don't think about, is that in many developing nation environments there is no such thing as local number portability, or the ability to move your phone number between any of the major national-scale mobile phone network operators or VoIP providers as you wish. As you can do in the USA if you become unsatisfied with your Tmobile service and want to move to ATT, keeping your phone number. This is one of the reasons why dual (and even triple) SIM phones are so popular outside of North America. In a lot of countries I don't see number portability in the SS7/PSTN system ever becoming a political reality, due to regulatory capture on the part of the national telecom regulator. At least not before pure IP based communications and apps make the concept of a PSTN phone number irrelevant entirely.
kd913 6y ago
On the other hand, email is the single largest causes of cyber attacks. The communication is not E2E encrypted (apart from a few GPG/SMIME users), no forward secrecy and barely any signature checks. Even if outlook, thunderbird maybe supports it, goodluck getting all the mobile versions to support it too. The clients used to view emails suffer from the same problem with browsers so are subject to all the HTML/JS/CSS privacy attacks. I wish all companies would move to something centralized solution where communication is guaranteed to only come from those within the same service. This way Sharon from HR won't open every link, download every crypto/ransomeware. Maybe my IT could also save 150k a year by not having to send me phishing 'training' emails and instead deal with some decent forms of signature checking. Heck billions of dollars a year are wasted because of phishing, spam, crypto attacks because of email. From my perspective, email is a shitty legacy tech from 1990s that should be moved to a modern solution that enables E2E encryption or signature checks at a minimum.

randoramax 6y ago

We need to think of ways to run the various Matrix, Mastodon, peertube etc in tiny boxes in our homes! There is no real reason for not promoting self hosting. The same way i buy a small Nas or an amazon firetv stick, with apps, I would buy a small box with pihole, mastodon and matrix.

StavrosK 6y ago
Have you tried running Mastodon and Matrix on a Pi? I'm not so confident it'd work, these aren't lean servers. I would love a tiny server I can run on my home server (for my tiny message volume), but Mastodon and Synapse are optimized for large servers.
- walrus01 6y ago
  synapse is actually quite tiny, but its use of an sqlite db on disk and other disk-write related activities, over a long term of months or years, seems quite likely to destroy a raspberry pi microsd card in much the same way that ordinary logging will destroy a microsd card. yes the rpi4 can boot from a USB-connected 'real' sata device now, which is an improvement.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    > synapse is actually quite tiny Hmm, is it really? My server has a SSD so I don't care about writes, I just want it to be low on CPU and memory requirements.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      an entire synapse with its python environment is about 150MB of disk space occupied, before any user data starts getting written to the database. chat for a group of about twenty people runs fine on a VM with 512MB of RAM. After boot about 300MB of the system RAM is occupied by the base minimal debian OS and other daemons (snmpd, etc), leaving plenty for python3. this same machine also has a minimal nginx setup as the standard reverse proxy configuration for TLS1.2/TLS1.3 in front of the synapse daemon, which isn't set up for any crypto and only listens on localhost.

Evidlo 6y ago

These are all complaints about the app's UI, not Matrix or federated networks. > If we could do better, we would have done better by now. I'm guessing you might have said something similar about a non-profit running a massively popular chat application 5 years ago. The only pieces missing now are interoperability and community involvement.

foobiekr 6y ago

I agree with this. Even Signal is just barely this year entering in the realm of practically useable for most of my friends and family.

xurukefi 6y ago

> Users value their convenience, and security and privacy are inconvenient. True. A messenger will be widely adopted if it offers features that WhatsApp et al. don't have. And by that I don't mean security or privacy, but something that people actually care about, like the stickers in telegram for example. And then that messenger just needs to be secure without interfering with functionality, convenience or UX ... problem solved.

smolder 6y ago

I'm not so sure. It really hasn't been that long in a generational sense that the internet has been around. Society may still be in the honeymoon phase of it's relationship with the internet. If building network services was like building houses, we may not be anywhere near drywall. Who is the "we" who can't do better, just technologists? Or humanity as a whole? Is it all just a demand side problem, and the people chose centralization, or was centralization a matter of policy for some group of sufficient influence? Is it just a byproduct of unfettered capitalism? A conspiracy to make the internet less 'libre' by a powerful special interest looking to profit (or a three letter agency looking to snoop) isn't outside the realm of possibility, is it? Anyway, I guess my point is that there are a lot of different factors that got us to this moment, and as people say, change is the only constant. I don't think anyone should give up on their ideas for the future, even if they've been tried without success before in some form.

sliken 6y ago

It's not easy to do better. Sure, Moxie has has a strong opinions, but has reasoning behind it. Not distributed or federated, because then you'll inevitable version drift, complex handshakes, more attack surface, different quality implementations, more risk to users, and overall a less secure system. Requiring a sim, annoying, makes it easier to track people through whoever paid for the sim. However it does make it hard for an attacker to create millions of accounts and camp on user names.

Triv888 6y ago

Skype was good when it used to be p2p... but when Microsoft bought it, they changed how it works.