4 ms·

> 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 decrea

by 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.
ezst 6y ago
> In my case I can definitely relate to this for personal communications, I no longer send emails to personal acquaintances I think we can agree that they have different strengths, I haven't seen much change in my usage of email for chatting with personal acquaintances because email has never been going strong there, unlike Instant Messaging… > but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run …if one thing, popular IM of today pack less features, not more, than those they replaced. Remember the golden age of MSN messenger? You had whiteboards, tictactoe/chess/… games with friends, screen sharing, fancy fonts & colors, "now listening to:" , wizz, … Ironically, XMPP inherited all those features out of necessity to be compatible with all those protocols (and I don't think it matters the slightest). XMPP does have quite nice and unique features of its own, if check-out the other response :) > WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay just like every other messenger then and now… (I'm not downplaying their coming ahead of this fierce competition, they must have done something right indeed, but "IM as a cheap alternatives to SMS" was popular a decade before WA) > WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO "Signal Protocol" is a mashup of encryption algorithms, signaling and session negotiation, at its very core there is the double-ratchet algorithm (for forward secrecy) and prekeys (for offline delivery), OMEMO is just that, implemented over XMPP primitives (with prekeys served over PubSub/PEP). > My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other. Indeed, it would take some careful considerations, but eh, same can be said about TLS. At a first glance, I don't see anything radically difficult about it, the main point would probably be to offer a generic endpoint to serve prekeys and there's nothing revolutionary or difficult about that. > I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it They did what every big business does: they optimized for their specific needs. When they decided that compatibility wasn't something they could monetize, they shut the gateway down and stopped caring about it. That tells nothing about the protocol, its capabilities, or of a presumed inability to extend it. For that matter, the X in XMPP stands for "eXtensible" protocol, and it's been quite good at keeping up for about 22 years, now :)

by hiq 6y ago

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.

ezst 6y ago

> In my case I can definitely relate to this for personal communications, I no longer send emails to personal acquaintances I think we can agree that they have different strengths, I haven't seen much change in my usage of email for chatting with personal acquaintances because email has never been going strong there, unlike Instant Messaging… > but a killer feature is way more efficient, especially in the long run …if one thing, popular IM of today pack less features, not more, than those they replaced. Remember the golden age of MSN messenger? You had whiteboards, tictactoe/chess/… games with friends, screen sharing, fancy fonts & colors, "now listening to:" , wizz, … Ironically, XMPP inherited all those features out of necessity to be compatible with all those protocols (and I don't think it matters the slightest). XMPP does have quite nice and unique features of its own, if check-out the other response :) > WA offered users a way to text using the same phone numbers for free in countries where you had to pay just like every other messenger then and now… (I'm not downplaying their coming ahead of this fierce competition, they must have done something right indeed, but "IM as a cheap alternatives to SMS" was popular a decade before WA) > WA also uses the Signal Protocol, which I assume is not directly compatible with OMEMO "Signal Protocol" is a mashup of encryption algorithms, signaling and session negotiation, at its very core there is the double-ratchet algorithm (for forward secrecy) and prekeys (for offline delivery), OMEMO is just that, implemented over XMPP primitives (with prekeys served over PubSub/PEP). > My point is that it's not as simple as setting COMPATIBLE=TRUE to make every network compatible with each other. Indeed, it would take some careful considerations, but eh, same can be said about TLS. At a first glance, I don't see anything radically difficult about it, the main point would probably be to offer a generic endpoint to serve prekeys and there's nothing revolutionary or difficult about that. > I doubt Facebook deviated from the base protocol just for the sake of it They did what every big business does: they optimized for their specific needs. When they decided that compatibility wasn't something they could monetize, they shut the gateway down and stopped caring about it. That tells nothing about the protocol, its capabilities, or of a presumed inability to extend it. For that matter, the X in XMPP stands for "eXtensible" protocol, and it's been quite good at keeping up for about 22 years, now :)