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Anyone can write a centralized chat app. Building a federated chat app is an order of magnitude more difficult, and is still a largely unexplored space.
by joepie91_ 6y ago
Anyone can write a centralized chat app. Building a federated chat app is an order of magnitude more difficult, and is still a largely unexplored space.
- Semaphor 6y agoXMPP/Jabber explored it pretty well. And for a glorious few months, I could use a FLOSS client (with for me far superior UX to any other modern client) to talk to people on Facebook and GTalk as well as all proper Jabber servers.
- newswasboring 6y agoI remember those days. It was so rewarding to be able to throw together a Twitter and chat client in an afternoon (especially as a very new coder). I don't think that kind of stuff is possible any more.
- newswasboring 6y agoLet me rephrase a bit, and this is now my opinion not op's. The UX is the most important problem to solve. Sure making a secure federated chat app may be harder in quantifiable sense, the structures are not really know. But for UX, honestly speaking I feel like nothing is known. We can copy WhatsApp interface, just like you can copy signal/WhatsApp architecture. But is that really what makes them successful?
- nathias 6y agoactually chat apps started decentralized, irc was a protocol and it was by far the best communication tool