4 ms·

I finally managed to move a big chunk of my friends over to Signal after almost a year of gentle but steady encouragement. Now I wish I hadn't bothered. I'm su

I finally managed to move a big chunk of my friends over to Signal after almost a year of gentle but steady encouragement. Now I wish I hadn't bothered. I'm sure I won't be able to get them to move again and I've lost my confidence that any other new solution will be trustworthy. Maybe the devil you know in WhatsApp is better than more nasty surprises like this?

webmobdev 6y ago
GNU Jami - https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ - is what you needed to promote. There's a very good reason most of the commercial messengers never mention it when they compare themselves to other messengers ... it's the obvious winner.
- raspyberr 6y ago
  I think Jami is great. Not having offline messages would be a pretty killer disadvantage to regular people though right?
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Offline messaging is indeed a challenge on such distributed services that avoid any central servers. Currently messages are only cached for around 10 minutes in the DHT network before they are discarded. The way Jami currently handles delivery of such messages is to cache the message on the sender's device, and send it as soon the recipient of the message comes online. This ofcourse requires the sender to be online as much as possible. Beta testing is currently going on for group chats that will also provide a better solution for this - https://jami.net/swarm-introducing-a-new-generation-of-group-conversations/ https://jami.net/swarm-introducing-a-new-generation-of-group... ...
- frereubu 6y ago
  It's too late. I've already spent all my social capital moving those people over, and it'll take at least two years to build that back up again. I don't mean to be too negative about this because I'm sure you're suggesting this in good faith, but nobody is going to switch to something that literally none of them will have heard about. Whether a particular technical solution is the best or not will never trump network effects when trying to move 50+ non-technical people over to a new messaging app.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a real issue - the network effect that locks in people to popular messaging services.

webmobdev 6y ago

GNU Jami - https://jami.net/ https://jami.net/ - is what you needed to promote. There's a very good reason most of the commercial messengers never mention it when they compare themselves to other messengers ... it's the obvious winner.

raspyberr 6y ago
I think Jami is great. Not having offline messages would be a pretty killer disadvantage to regular people though right?
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Offline messaging is indeed a challenge on such distributed services that avoid any central servers. Currently messages are only cached for around 10 minutes in the DHT network before they are discarded. The way Jami currently handles delivery of such messages is to cache the message on the sender's device, and send it as soon the recipient of the message comes online. This ofcourse requires the sender to be online as much as possible. Beta testing is currently going on for group chats that will also provide a better solution for this - https://jami.net/swarm-introducing-a-new-generation-of-group-conversations/ https://jami.net/swarm-introducing-a-new-generation-of-group... ...
frereubu 6y ago
It's too late. I've already spent all my social capital moving those people over, and it'll take at least two years to build that back up again. I don't mean to be too negative about this because I'm sure you're suggesting this in good faith, but nobody is going to switch to something that literally none of them will have heard about. Whether a particular technical solution is the best or not will never trump network effects when trying to move 50+ non-technical people over to a new messaging app.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Yeah, that's a real issue - the network effect that locks in people to popular messaging services.