4 ms·

> _why_ communication has moved away from email Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. > or why

by ezst 6y ago

> _why_ communication has moved away from email Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. > or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure as a result > making sweeping changes to the protocol/client in the name of UX becomes intractable. This starts to be dated, but is a counter-example: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html XMPP keeps evolving, and probably faster, and with better adoption than something centralized like Skype for instance. Moreover, we've arguably less feature-packed messengers now than we had two decades ago. > It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since the beginning of time, but why can Matrix solve this problem if XMPP cannot? Signal just works. The irony. Signal contributes to fragmentation. We seem to pretend that it's a protocol/technical issue, but did you know that WhatsApp runs on XMPP, so did Google Talk, and Facebook Messenger early on? All those silos could open federation and let messages be exchanged across services, but chose not to do so (including Signal), because they have more to gain in keeping you hostage.

spurgu 6y ago
>> _why_ communication has moved away from email > Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. Email feels more like a tool for reaching out than for communicating to me. I.e. it serves like an RSS feed and serves like a way for unknowns (or long lost friends/acquaintances) to reach out to you. Sure some people still use newsgroups and communicate daily over email, but for most people it's just a method to sign up for accounts in walled gardens.
- messo 6y ago
  The email protocol is being used for instant messaging — check out DeltaChat. It works much better than I expected, and it is possibly the most desentralized solution there is.
- ezst 6y ago
  Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made … and in the few instances where it's not going over Outlook, it's because it's on a GApps tenant, in which case it's GMail instead. The biggest threat to outlook and email today is probably MSTeams, and ironically enough, it federates just fine so that two employees from two distinct companies can chat as if they were on the same tenant.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    > Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made Stuff like that was what I meant. I wouldn't call receipts, calendar invitations and verification emails "communication" (as in person to person). I agree though that email is a prime medium for B2B communication, but within a company you'd usually use another medium (like Slack).
hiq 6y ago
> Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. I think OP meant that there's been a significant decrease in usage. In my case I can definitely relate to this for personal communications, I no longer send emails to personal acquaintances, I mostly use email for professional purposes, so I think OP's point stands. > Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure as a result Maybe marketing would work, but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run. WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay. Decentralization, like being-open source, does not provide short-term benefits to a user, so you still need distinguishing features. > did you know that WhatsApp runs on XMPP [...] All those silos could open federation and let messages be exchanged across services but chose not to do so (including Signal), because they have more to gain in keeping you hostage. WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO (or this name wouldn't exist). From the little information I found, it uses a customized version of XMPP, which is also probably not directly compatible with XMPP. My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other. I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it (and there are simpler ways to prevent 3rd party clients), they wanted to implement something which was missing. They wanted to customize XMPP to add features (pretty much Moxie's argument against federation).
- rakoo 6y ago
  > Decentralization, like being-open source, does not provide short-term benefits to a user, so you still need distinguishing features. XMPP's killer feature is, for me, its pubsub capability (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html). From a technical point of view it's just an ordered key-value store with notification, but from a user point of view it allows way more uses than "simply" messaging: microblogging (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html, can replace twitter), generic status updating (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html), good-old key-value store (keys for OMEMO), standard blogging (to replace Facebook) XMPP also has message types and threadings, so you can build stuff like forums (to replace Reddit), diffusion lists (like Telegram channels)... It has everything, and it is there to be used. Some clients have done it for some time now, it's not a technical problem anymore; it's a marketing problem. None of what Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger or Telegram or Signal do cannot be done by XMPP.

by ezst 6y ago

spurgu 6y ago

>> _why_ communication has moved away from email > Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. Email feels more like a tool for reaching out than for communicating to me. I.e. it serves like an RSS feed and serves like a way for unknowns (or long lost friends/acquaintances) to reach out to you. Sure some people still use newsgroups and communicate daily over email, but for most people it's just a method to sign up for accounts in walled gardens.

messo 6y ago
The email protocol is being used for instant messaging — check out DeltaChat. It works much better than I expected, and it is possibly the most desentralized solution there is.
ezst 6y ago
Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made … and in the few instances where it's not going over Outlook, it's because it's on a GApps tenant, in which case it's GMail instead. The biggest threat to outlook and email today is probably MSTeams, and ironically enough, it federates just fine so that two employees from two distinct companies can chat as if they were on the same tenant.
- spurgu 6y ago
  > Well, I don't know in which world you live, but in mine Outlook is alive and kicking, that's where purchase orders are confirmed, meetings with suppliers are organized, business decisions are made Stuff like that was what I meant. I wouldn't call receipts, calendar invitations and verification emails "communication" (as in person to person). I agree though that email is a prime medium for B2B communication, but within a company you'd usually use another medium (like Slack).

hiq 6y ago

> Has it, though? I don't think we are any step closer now to dropping email than we were 25 years ago. I think OP meant that there's been a significant decrease in usage. In my case I can definitely relate to this for personal communications, I no longer send emails to personal acquaintances, I mostly use email for professional purposes, so I think OP's point stands. > Could be the lack of marketing (because there isn't a corporation or venture capital money behind benefiting from exponential user base growth) and critical mass/peer-pressure as a result Maybe marketing would work, but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run. WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay. Decentralization, like being-open source, does not provide short-term benefits to a user, so you still need distinguishing features. > did you know that WhatsApp runs on XMPP [...] All those silos could open federation and let messages be exchanged across services but chose not to do so (including Signal), because they have more to gain in keeping you hostage. WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO (or this name wouldn't exist). From the little information I found, it uses a customized version of XMPP, which is also probably not directly compatible with XMPP. My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other. I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it (and there are simpler ways to prevent 3rd party clients), they wanted to implement something which was missing. They wanted to customize XMPP to add features (pretty much Moxie's argument against federation).

rakoo 6y ago
> Decentralization, like being-open source, does not provide short-term benefits to a user, so you still need distinguishing features. XMPP's killer feature is, for me, its pubsub capability (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html). From a technical point of view it's just an ordered key-value store with notification, but from a user point of view it allows way more uses than "simply" messaging: microblogging (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html, can replace twitter), generic status updating (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html), good-old key-value store (keys for OMEMO), standard blogging (to replace Facebook) XMPP also has message types and threadings, so you can build stuff like forums (to replace Reddit), diffusion lists (like Telegram channels)... It has everything, and it is there to be used. Some clients have done it for some time now, it's not a technical problem anymore; it's a marketing problem. None of what Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger or Telegram or Signal do cannot be done by XMPP.