4 ms·
This needs 2016 in the title. Signal can spin stories about why federated protocols don’t work, but the simple explanation behind this is Signal doesn’t want to
by AnonC 5y ago
This needs 2016 in the title. Signal can spin stories about why federated protocols don’t work, but the simple explanation behind this is Signal doesn’t want to do certain things. Signal’s unwillingness to avoid doing certain things shouldn’t construed as “hard to do” or “not worth doing” or “too much hassle”. Take every position that Signal takes with a pinch of salt. It is, after all, a centralized platform that benefits from centralization.
- detaro 5y agoyep. for better or worse (it is security-wise), a federated platform has taken over way more of my chatting than Signal ever reached, and Signals insistence on "we know what client people want" plays a large part in that.
- bogota 5y agoI have yet to see a federated chat app my tech illiterate family can download and use. Sure I have set some up to test out but the UX is terrible on all of them. Matrix was the most polished but still horrible compared to signal. Everyone loves to rag on signal here it seems. They would rather something be correct in ideals than help the largest amount of people. It’s a strange and holier than thou stance to take in my opinion.
- stormbrew 5y agoI mean, there was a while there where XMPP-based and federated chat clients (particularly google chat, along with early facebook messenger) were becoming dominant, and were widely used by "normal people" without even knowing it was a thing. So I don't think "it's impossible to make a non-shitty federated client" is really a valid argument. That's not to dispute real problems with wide-open federation or XMPP, because they absolutely exist, just that "the clients are hard to use" seems more an artifact of the resources of the people making them than anything to do with technical merit.
- thfuran 5y ago>So I don't think "it's impossible to make a non-shitty federated client" is really a valid argument. Perhaps not, but it's definitely a strawman.
- deadlyllama 5y agoI wonder if some of what went wrong with XMPP was the big platforms (Facebook, Gmail) adopting it, then dropping it. Coupled with the rise of smartphones and the cloud. Previously you ran your chat app on a desktop PC and it stored your chat history/etc. I imagine federated chat means more opportunities for your users to avoid seeing ads too... Just use someone else's server!
- vel0city 5y agoWere things like Google Chat and Facebook chat actually federated, or did they just allow for XMPP clients to authenticate and have some marginal functionality of the platform? If I was a member on some XMPP server, could I send a message to either platform without having a Google or Facebook account?
- eximius 5y agoYou managed to not address any point in the article, instead insinuating poor motives by the author. I want federation to work. But this is a fair critique of the tradeoff and competition between centralized and federated services - and the dynamics of network switching instead of host switching.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- notriddle 5y agoPlease make actual arguments, and not just Bulverism. After all, building a centralized system and an organization that can run it is the behavior you would expect from someone who sincerely thought it was a better way to make a messenger.