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How'd you get your friends to move over to Telegram? I'm trying to get that ball moving with my circle of friends.

antr 13y ago
I didn't... they started showing up on my contact list. I then found out that they read about the app on the newspaper.
malandrew 13y ago
Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service. If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  I suppose that is its own form of decentralization.
- roc 13y ago
  Even distributed protocols aren't a silver bullet. Embrace and extend can make short work of that. As can joining standards boards and playing political games. As can simply turning off federation. Sometimes I think HTTP and SMTP are only limping along because there's a large enough enterprise base that doesn't want to see any changes at all. Maybe that presents a defense (get your competing protocol entrenched in corporate IT), but not many technologies get birthed out to the consumer space from the enterprise space the way http and smtp did.
- qq66 13y ago
  There's no such thing as a decentralized conmunications tool. Even email requires the centralization provided by ICANN.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    You can send email without using DNS. I'm not sure I'd call IP addresses centralised, if perhaps you were thinking of ICANN's running of IANA? If you consider the internet inherently "centralised" then surely you'd still find CB radio or similar to be decentralised. Or do you also consider the allocation of wavebands to be "centralised"?
    - michaelmior 13y ago
      Depends on how far you want to push the definition of decentralized. The routing infrastructure of the Internet is still fairly centralized as is the allocation of IP addresses.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Making a messaging service successful requires huge amounts of time and effort. If it's so decentralized that it cannot even be acquired, how could it get built? To be clear, I don't doubt that the technical side is very feasible. It's the user acquisition side that seems improbable except as a commercial venture.
- seanalltogether 13y ago
  I think the problem is that historically, we only ever collectively solved the email server. It's unfortunate that we didn't solve the more general case of communication through a server hub. We shouldn't have email addresses, we should have connection addresses, that provide access to mail, chat, audio, video, whatever.

antr 13y ago

I didn't... they started showing up on my contact list. I then found out that they read about the app on the newspaper.

Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service. If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.

morganherlocker 13y ago
I suppose that is its own form of decentralization.
roc 13y ago
Even distributed protocols aren't a silver bullet. Embrace and extend can make short work of that. As can joining standards boards and playing political games. As can simply turning off federation. Sometimes I think HTTP and SMTP are only limping along because there's a large enough enterprise base that doesn't want to see any changes at all. Maybe that presents a defense (get your competing protocol entrenched in corporate IT), but not many technologies get birthed out to the consumer space from the enterprise space the way http and smtp did.
qq66 13y ago
There's no such thing as a decentralized conmunications tool. Even email requires the centralization provided by ICANN.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  You can send email without using DNS. I'm not sure I'd call IP addresses centralised, if perhaps you were thinking of ICANN's running of IANA? If you consider the internet inherently "centralised" then surely you'd still find CB radio or similar to be decentralised. Or do you also consider the allocation of wavebands to be "centralised"?
  - michaelmior 13y ago
    Depends on how far you want to push the definition of decentralized. The routing infrastructure of the Internet is still fairly centralized as is the allocation of IP addresses.
jfoster 13y ago
Making a messaging service successful requires huge amounts of time and effort. If it's so decentralized that it cannot even be acquired, how could it get built? To be clear, I don't doubt that the technical side is very feasible. It's the user acquisition side that seems improbable except as a commercial venture.
seanalltogether 13y ago
I think the problem is that historically, we only ever collectively solved the email server. It's unfortunate that we didn't solve the more general case of communication through a server hub. We shouldn't have email addresses, we should have connection addresses, that provide access to mail, chat, audio, video, whatever.