6 ms·

If everyone's messaging has to be compatible with everyone else's then maybe we will finally only need one messaging app on our phones again instead of 5. Sound

• guestbest 4y ago
  I thought email already did all of this
  • barelysapient 4y ago
    Exactly! And now messaging can work exactly like it!
  • willyt 4y ago
    I forgot email. Even better, integrate messages with my email client and then they would all be in one place. Can't wait. Don't care how they are sent, just want to know if I write something to someone it gets there. Don't want random strangers to be able to write to me without my consent. That's my spec for the ideal setup.
    • djtango 4y ago
      I had a globally distributed family and WhatsApp was literally a life changer for me back in 2009/2010. I'm sure other people in a similar position will also know what I'm talking about. It was super lightweight, cheap, multiplatform - when I was interning in Singapore in 2012, I was able to stretch a 2MB pay as you go SIM plan over 2 months using WhatsApp over WAP on a Symbian iPhone. There are few things I will be more loyal to. Now, with my biases declared, I am genuinely open to understanding why SMTP/IMAP based chat didn't take off. I don't know much about the protocols but as you say, email should have solved this problem. But somehow it lacked that immediacy of instant messaging that made me feel that much more connected to my family halfway across the planet. Maybe that's what it was - email delivered in 1-5 seconds is completely fine, but instant messaging needs to be delivered in under 500ms ideally. Is there something about the email protocol that makes it slower due to some tradeoffs?
      • guestbest 4y ago
        Is whatsapp data traffic free, but email traffic isn’t?
        • djtango 4y ago
          No, it was more a case that the whatsapp client was exceptionally lightweight - especially in 2012 when WhatsApp was basically free global SMS The email client was much clunkier, presumably because it had to support all the other usage patterns of email. Worth noting this was a phone that didn't have a touch screen and I was inputting via the numpad
    • jodrellblank 4y ago
      Twenty two minutes ago you cared about groups, pictures and emojis. Email clients don't do emojis well or groups well, SMS doesn't do any of them, and IIRC Blackberry did everything in one program 15 years ago. Downvoted because this is the comment equivalent of the manager walking into a technical discussion of how something should work and demanding "just make it work" and leaving. Or commenting on a war topic "I just want peace I don't care how it happens". Like, you and everyone? But that doesn't make concerns like "people who don't use Facebook don't want their photos routed through Facebook servers without their knowledge or consent" magically vanish. There's a reason federated open protocol multi-service clients never became dominant and it's not because the problem space is trivial. "Just make it work" gets you iMessage, and that slurped your SMSs through Apple servers without telling you, which is still one of the cheekiest most unbelievable things I'd heard of at the time, despite that being tame by big tech company standards today.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        Users just want simple direct communications to work (yes, with more features than that, E2EE, image sending, and such; but those features are not the focus). Companies want to get users into a walled-garden where they can target them for financial and political gains. Democracy trying to push things away from the latter seems good. Do you agree?
        • tekknik 4y ago
          What about this is a walled garden. SMS exists, this is an attempt to get green bubbles painted blue, and reactions to attach to a bubble. These are all visual changes and not at all required for functionality. Explain how this is such a problem that a government decided to focus any effort on this. It seems like they have nothing better to do.
        • jodrellblank 4y ago
          Apple's walled garden of the app store, no sideload apps, is a way they can profit. What financial or political gain is Apple getting from people using iMessage instead of WhatsApp?
      • 4y ago
  • coldpie 4y ago
    I honestly think the Subject line was the death of email.
  • lopis 4y ago
    Most of my friends don't frequently read their emails and have such bad inbox hygiene that I would expect them to miss half of my emails.
    • tekknik 4y ago
      Probably because every automated system has to send 10 emails per action, making me have 100 emails every time I look. Turn off the team wide email notifications and Id check it more often.
    • guestbest 4y ago
      If they miss emails, then they’d probably miss a chat stream
      • doublerabbit 4y ago
        And that's IRC in the nutshell, until you joined you have no history of any conversation. Sure you can scroll up in future apps like Discord but barely few read the channel conversations when they join a new server.
        • guestbest 4y ago
          But email does keep a history. IRC didn’t push a history to the client until v3 I think
  • SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
    The social contract of email dictates that it is not a real time communication media. Some people do check their email in real time, but many don't, so you can't rely on that.
    • willyt 4y ago
      I don't check anything in real time. I do it maybe two-four times a day. I don't want clients, bosses or friends that expect me to reply within seconds to messages.
  • BostonEnginerd 4y ago
    Delta.chat (https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/) has a decent enough UI for using email as an IM service actually.
• tenpies 4y ago
  I'm actually very afraid of precisely that, because knowing the EU, they will want administrator access, to "combat misinformation and disinformation" and "monitor for extremism" of course. Nothing nefarious.
  • piaste 4y ago
    Before even the flawed STARTTLS was a thing, people wanting to have private communication over unencrypted email would simply exchange public keys and use PGP to create encrypted messages. If E2E were not available for any reason whatsover, we could go back to that as necessary, though might lose some extra benefits of integrated E2E platforms like perfect forward secrecy (or maybe not; I'm not really up to date on my crypto). With a standard and open protocol enforced, we could create a FOSS client that automatically pre-shares a public key and de/encrypts messages before sending them, so the UX would be much better than the awkwardness of early PGP.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Great. Let that one app be the all mighty Yahoo Messenger!
  • alessioalex 4y ago
    Yahoo Messenger! had the best emojies.
• rkangel 4y ago
  The solution I use to minimise this is Element One (https://element.io/element-one https://element.io/element-one). This is a paid for service that operates bridges from Matrix to Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. I then get to communicate with all those contacts in one place (I'm on Android so iMessage not a problem). I signed up the moment it came out and they had some teething reliability problems for a while, but it's been great for months now. Element is a much better web client than any of the others and it's nice to not have to worry about which computer or platform I'm on when I want to write a message.
  • raybb 4y ago
    Does it work with private WhatsApp chats? 1:1s
    • rkangel 4y ago
      Yes, it works as you would expect.
  • codethief 4y ago
    I assume this means the Element One servers have access to the plaintext of my messages?
    • rkangel 4y ago
      They do, and this is a legitimate concern. I thought about it and decided I didn't care so much. An alternative is to self host the same set of services.
    • ppseafield 4y ago
      That's correct. It's encrypted in transit, but the endpoint bridges decrypt messages then reencrypt them. IIRC you can run the bridges yourself on your own servers - Element just offers this service as well.
    • ognarb 4y ago
      Yeah, but they are also working on an alternate solution where the bridging happens in the client, which doesn't have this issue.
• sdfghswe 4y ago
  You don't care about any features, apart from the features you care about. Just like everyone else.
  • chimeracoder 4y ago
    > You don't care about any features, apart from the features you care about. Just like everyone else. That's a pretty uncharitable way to interpret the statement, when the three features OP mentioned are a part of literally every modern messaging platform that people use. Not just iMessage and RCS (the open protocol which is the best analog to iMessage), but WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Messenger, Instagram, Slack... It's actually hard to think of one that doesn't. I guess IRC, if you consider that in any way comparable to the others, but it really isn't at this point, being a now fairly obscure protocol reserved mostly for tech-savvy people and niche cases.
    • tekknik 4y ago
      It doesn’t matter if it’s an obscure protocol, if it’s used in a large business then they must comply. Wait until discord or any of the gaming focused media apps try to unify on features.
      • doublerabbit 4y ago
        Which they've already started with XBOX and PS integrations.
    • kjreact 4y ago
      I similarly interpreted OP as someone who only wants basic features in messaging while the reply implies that not everyone views those three features as the only necessary features. Nothing uncharitable about saying that everyone’s needs are different.
      • sdfghswe 4y ago
        Exactly. For example, I care about pictures and emojis but not groups. And groups crucially is the one thing that (from what I hear) is extremely non-trivial to do well alongside with E2E encryption. So nothing "basic" about it, it turns out.
• tekknik 4y ago
  But then your messaging app will have to be compatible with discord, and both offer and accept video streams. It will be impossible to build an app that supports everything. And with 10%-20% global turnover as a fine, the EU is turning into a dictator.
  • scohesc 4y ago
    I'd be fine with the EU proposing certain standards that must be met in order for an app to be used as an official messaging app, like: [ ] - Can send and receive basic text messages [ ] - Can send and receive rich text messages (bold, italics, underline, headings, etc.) [ ] - Ability to send and display file formats (debatable which ones - maybe force custom animated emojis to be transmitted, cached for later use as compatible file formats (webm, gif, etc.) Just as an example. The EU is going to mess it up, as they likely will by forcing all companies to "fall in line" with standards that will likely not be updated frequently, instead of allowing smaller companies to innovate first, then enforcing current policies if there's too much BS behaviour in the industry. See - current rumors of Apple creating "special" Apple USB-C cables that will be the only ones to allow faster charging and data transfers, compared to other high-quality USB-C cables that an iPhone won't permit to have high data transfer rates and will charge devices slowly. You can set the standard, but companies with enough money and legal know-how can still bypass the intent of the law! Smaller companies can't compete on the accessories market. Unless other government are serious about this (the EU is a fairly small market segment compared to the rest of the world), we're going to see more of this regulation dodging and chicanery from massive companies while smaller ones suffer or struggle to succeed in a marketplace dominated by capital interests.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  I already have all the emojis I need in Unicode. Only need to send multimedia reliably and have groups.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  I wish somebody had stolen the Windows Phone idea of linking all the socials to the Contacts system, so if you want to message a person you go through Contacts and it would show their full unified social history. It would be simple to expand this so their preferred contact app is up top on their contact page. Remove the messengers from your home-screen altogether and start from Contacts.
• luxcem 4y ago
  Remind me of https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/
• _boffin_ 4y ago
  I’m not needing 5. I have a phone number and people can text me via that.
• shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I don't care about features aside from pictures, groups, emojis, reactions, editing and threading