7 ms·

Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram

146 points by bndr 12y ago

wmeredith 12y ago
This raises the obvious question, then who is going to pay for them?
- learnstats2 12y ago
  Who pays for e-mail?
  - maccard 12y ago
    In gmail - ads
  - kyllo 12y ago
    E-mail is an open protocol, but clients and hosting are generally not free. You can pay for them, or you can subscribe to ad-supported services where they data-mine your inbox so they can target ads to you. But someone is paying for it.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    Private companies big enough to warrant a proper GApps account or their own mail server (or many).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - benihana 12y ago
    With my personal email - google. They handle the costs of storage and transport and in exchange they show me ads and collect high level data. With my work email - my company. They pay to keep the email secure and contextual and in exchange I keep it mostly related to work.
    - learnstats2 12y ago
      The cost of storing and transporting e-mail is potentially so low that I would claim you are overpaying Google.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Who pays for e-mail? This is the question of a zen master. In four words you've said more than the entire hagiography of TFA. Yes of course, someone has to pay for electricity, but when using an open protocol the user chooses who pays and what they're paying for. If Facebook could go back in time and kill email, they would in a heartbeat. The communications of free people should not be supervised, whether by dictators or by capitalists.
  - api 12y ago
    Google and every other company that invests the immense time and money required to keep it clear of spam. Email without a large spam filtering infrastructure is unusable.
    - Zigurd 12y ago
      I used email before there were infrastructure-based spam filters. It was very usable with client-based spam filters. You can't do encrypted email without either a whitelisting system or client-based spam filters.
  - deathy 12y ago
    Interesting question. Anyone and everyone. I may host my own email server or I might pay someone to host it. Or the government could host it, or my university could host it. Or I could get it for free by agreeing to be served some ads. But who pays for it doesn't matter. I can send you an email even if we use very different providers (from the point of view of both technology and payment). For messaging I don't see this yet. I feel like XMPP was supposed to be the chosen one. I had a google account but chatted to my gmail contacts through my self-hosted jabber server. I wonder if this new generation of messaging apps will get to that point anytime soon.
- andyidsinga 12y ago
  users could certainly pay ..but through a donation model similar to public radio or maybe Wikipedia. there's a carefull line to walk if 'sponsors' come on board but it's possible.
alexwebb2 12y ago
This read like an ad for Telegram.
- scosman 12y ago
  Yeah, but everything's true. Encrypted by default, huge bounty for security researches, fast, great cross platform apps.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    Encrypted with their home-grown crypto. Telegram is not fully free and open source. Encryption by default? That has to be new, it was not when I recently checked. And of course there is http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-cryptanalysis-contest http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta... Use Signal/Textsecure, folks.
  - unicornporn 12y ago
    > Encrypted by default However, it does not use the end to end encryption "by default". Relevant: https://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/10/its-not-about-the-encryption-its-about-the-encryption-keys/ https://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/10/its-not-about-...
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
tedunangst 12y ago
Woah. Hardcore encryption? Is that even better than military grade encryption?
- AngrySkillzz 12y ago
  I don't think any reasonable person would refer to Telegram's horrific chimera as "hardcore encryption."
benihana 12y ago
>Secure messaging should be free for everyone. Displaying ads alongside your private communication seems out of place, even immoral I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this service to work without someone footing the bill?
- avalaunch 12y ago
  It wasn't left out. You must have missed it. Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."
- learnstats2 12y ago
  The marginal cost of messaging is low enough that phone companies are happy to offer you an incredibly low cost per formerly-private communication (landline or mobile). while the marginal cost of e-mail is so low that we get tonnes of spam. Who needs to pay anything more? We already pay for the infrastructure.
- harigov 12y ago
  Messaging is important because it provides a person-to-person communication platform for arbitrary data. It blends in the rich interaction capabilities offered by internet with more personalized and free-form interaction offered by telephones or personal visits. Sending text messages to each other is only the first step. One can perform any kind of communication on top of messaging with proper apps. You can charge for these value added services and generate reasonable revenue.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  This question is answered rather quickly when you ask two questions: 1. What exactly are people paying for? 2. Is that actually necessary for messaging? If the answer to 1 is servers, the answer to 2 is no: distributed or federated messaging is entirely reasonable and possible to do. If the answer to 1 is paid developers, the answer to 2 is no: there are plenty of developers willing to work on open source. Try it.
inevrela 12y ago
It's either app, or users are the product. When I was in Hong Kong recently, listening to talks about WhatsApp & Facebook, each person using these services was worth +- $48. Sub. fee? Anything like that.
textrmessenger 12y ago
I think the key thing here is that Durov has the money from selling stock in his previous company (12% w/valuation of 3-4 billion) which means he can afford to pay to support the app in the meantime without any external financial help. I do think there are different ways to monetize messaging outside of pushing advertisements into people's face or selling information and third-party paid apps are a good option. In that regard I think the title is misleading: Durov plans to make money through the app eventually, just not through selling people's information or push advertising.
- harigov 12y ago
  You can always say that the messaging app itself isn't making money but the underlying technology is.
  - textrmessenger 12y ago
    I think that is a good point. For start-ups who are interested in making messaging services, I wonder what Durov's recommendation would be as far as financials go. One has to be able to support the team they are working with and there are few people out there who can take the route Durov has due to his financial freedom.
    - harigov 12y ago
      In certain way, cost of doing business has reduced because of cloud service providers. However, network effects and the scale requirements still add up and make it hard for startup's to work on their long term vision. It would be nice if computation was similar to electricity. That way, the onus of paying for the services lies on the end users - the more you use, the more you pay. It is more straightforward and startups can sustain paying themselves for few years without having to worry about paying for computation, storage and network.
- caoilte 12y ago
  Nobody sets out to do evil but until he creates an ownership structure which prevents himself from cashing in once he's won everyone's trust this is just an underdog doing whatever it takes to attract customers. To be succinct, one day he will sell out and the buyers will have every incentive to make money out of their users.
harunurhan 12y ago
Telegram is a great messaging apps. Private, desktop and web support, fast, better UI compared to WhatsApp. The problem is my friend don't know it so I have to be stuck with WhatsApp for now.
- free2rhyme214 12y ago
  The fast follower problem.
zanny 12y ago
> "We're trying to create a new type of IT company, one that never focuses on maximising profits, but instead provides value to society," This is dreadful. The Free software movement has existed for decades and Telegram brings nothing new to the table that Google hadn't already a decade ago (open yet crippled protocol, proprietary servers). There is nothing new here, besides the fact that Telegram basically makes no money. Which is also nothing new, since Google Talk and Voice never made money either! I don't mind it, because we know the protocol and can reengineer the clients easily in the event they betray their users trust. It is much better than WhatsApp or Skype being a whole-pipe black box. But at the end of the day, XMPP has existed, has improved, and today provides all the features of all these other messaging transports and more, the problem is there is no money to be had in providing an easy signup XMPP service, so nobody advertises them. Which makes Telegram perplexing, because their only valuable resource is their userbase, and they are not directly monetizing it at all. Contrast that with Duckduckgo having an XMPP server @dukgo.com that basically got a blog post and hasn't been talked about much since, that I use all the time on all my devices. But fundamentally none of this absolves how stupid all these companies re-implement a wheel poorly (XMPP) because the old wheel is so well known and understood that you can't lock people in or profit off the users using it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vbezhenar 12y ago
  XMPP have troubles with synchronizing chats between clients, with push notifications, with user-friendly mobile clients. I like XMPP, I did set up my own server, but I finally abandoned it. It's usable only with one client, preferably on desktop.
  - catern 12y ago
    >synchronizing chats between clients, The Carbons XEP[0] is now fairly widely supported and does exactly this. >user-friendly mobile clients. Conversations[1] is excellent and is free software. >push notifications The centralized system of push notifactions on Android and iOS is not yet supported, it's true, but XMPP with its extensions has pretty good support for battery-constrained devices with intermittent network connections. I use XMPP across multiple devices with my own server to communicate to other people running their own server and it works great. Setting up your own server is extremely easy ("apt-get install prosody" works out of the box on Debian; stay away from ejabberd which is a pain) and I highly recommend it. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve...
aaggarwal 12y ago
Either users will pay with their money or pay with their data (getting ads), else the model is not sustainable. Since, messaging using Internet is being considered here as basic necessity, one could argue that Messaging apps turns to be non-profit organizations or government supported organizations (but anonymous).
- joelthelion 12y ago
  Costs are very low. If the owners don't want to maximize profit, the service can very well run like this for a very long time.
  - aaggarwal 12y ago
    You are only considering the cost of infrastructure. What about the basic salary for the people working on the application and monitoring infrastructure, who will pay for that, if not users and not ads and not government?
bmmayer1 12y ago
Just the opposite. The free software movement has led to apps and programs where the users are the product, not the customer, and companies bend over backwards for advertisers. The companies have no incentive to care about your privacy, just your data. Paid messaging apps, however (at least until they get acquired by advertising companies like Facebook), give companies incentives to service their customers first, and the users are actually the customers. That's why Slack and WhatsApp and HipChat and Basecamp have taken off--because they offer the security and paid customer/company relationship. This article's title is woefully non-conclusive. Sure it would be wonderful if ALL messaging apps could by built and funded by Russian billionaires such they were private and free for the end user, but the fact is that to support the infrastructure of a billion+ user messaging app, you need to make money. And if you can't make money from the users to whom you are promising security and privacy (and thus to whom you owe allegiance), you have to make money elsewhere. And the alternative is arguably what has caused so many security and privacy problems in the first place.
- troymc 12y ago
  It seems you missed this chunk of the article: <quote>Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."</quote>
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    How do you collect rent on an open platform?
    - boomzilla 12y ago
      "How do you make money off search?" -- question by a lot of smart people around 2000.
      - guessbest 12y ago
        The commenter above, bmmayer1, noted advertisers would be how that would be done. I believe a similar method was used with search engines.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
zackmorris 12y ago
I wish there was something like Bitcoin for messaging. Users need a better way to prove their identities (or hide them, depending on the situation) and be able to verify peers. The current hierarchical security system is probably destined to require money, but the free alternatives make me uncomfortable because they tend to need private keys. What I really want is an open version of Skype where the private key can always be generated by the user's mind, overcomes all the limitations like NAT that make users second class netizens, has no central tracker, and (optionally, but possibly required to work around the limitations) allows a certain amount of traffic to be forwarded like Tor. I don't see how we can have a conversation about who pays for messaging when the underlying infrastructure for truly secure online communication hasn't yet gone mainstream. I don't really trust Freenet or Tor and can't quite figure out how come, so maybe we could start there and figure out why that is. And a billion dollars for anything messaging-related completely blows my mind. Most of the world-changing software was developed for a few thousand dollars by a couple of people working in their spare time. To me, paying that much completely misses the point and probably hinders progress by locking capital up in niches that exclude developers who are working towards creating a non-scarcity based economy.
- ignoramous 12y ago
  https://tox.im https://tox.im ?
  - zackmorris 12y ago
    That's really cool, I like how you just give the other user a Tox id token and it sets up the secure channel. I wonder if that's a general approach for secure communication, because as long as it's sent through another secure channel (that may use the traditional SSL certificates from an authority) it could be used to avoid a MITM attack. Maybe a way to do this in the future with an insecure channel is to give the peer your contact token using only context that both of you know. So the above token could get converted to a human-readable string like "that place we met that first time and what you said to me with 12345abcdef on the end" and the other party would have to know you to figure out how to find you. Proving who you are beyond that point would probably involve some back and forth questioning like in spy movies or a video call (which could be faked in 5-10 years with computer rendering) so shared history will be key. It already sounds like it can run over Tor, but it would be nice if it had a standard socket wrapper that could be run over UDP NAT tunneling to look like an SSH VPN. Maybe WebRTC could be integrated with it somehow. I just mean that I'd like the negotiation phase to be separate so that if it works, you're just presented with a secure socket.
boomzilla 12y ago
The team is amazingly technical. Nikolai Durov is a triple IMO gold medallists (and from Russia where selection is much more competitive than most other countries) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov
amelius 12y ago
Messaging services (with say >100k users) should fall under general laws for telecommunications. For instance, this would solve the problem that messaging services don't interface with eachother (lock-in), and it would solve the problem of the provider peeking into any of the messages for whatever reason.
- snird 12y ago
  But what if I want a messaging service to specifically be disconnected with other services? By your offer, not only that you are forcing me to connect with everyone, you take an essential part of my privacy. Your suggestion is anti-freedom by its core.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Couldn't disagree more. Regulation has not solved any of these concerns, in fact quite the opposite. Regulation of telecommunication has resulted in some of the biggest and well-seated monopolies on the planet. Please, god, no. Messaging services should fall under exactly one law of the land, and that's the First Amendment.
Animats 12y ago
Is it open source and open protocol? If so, that's what we need. Email was once a bunch of proprietary systems - MCIMail, CompuServ, AOL, etc. It was inconvenient that they didn't interoperate. All those proprietary systems were wiped out by an open one.
fit2rule 12y ago
Since the early 90's, newcomers to the Internet have attempted to monetize the existing phenomenon which the Internet - in all its true free glory - has allowed. There have been countless attempts to 'own email', and before that, 'own Gopher' and 'own Archie' and so on. There was, once, Hotmail. Then came GMail, and then .. Facebook. It's quite possible to maintain your own social network with email alone. You can achieve the same results with a mailing list as you can with the Facebook timeline. The only difference is that you must educate the people in your network to understand how the technology works, and how to operate it in order to function in as effective a manner as is required to maintain a high standard of communication. The fact that this is nearly impossible in the modern context - that you cannot get a group of 200+ people to operate email in the same, standardized manner, is what Facebook - and other mass-communication media - depend upon in order to gain their market share. I would abandon Facebook in 5 minutes if I could be guaranteed that the people I care about - the links in my social network - were as competent at handling the solution as would be required in order to maintain the quality of communication that Facebook currently delivers. Alas, this is not possible - and those who are attempting to monetize and profit from this mass stupidity will do little to address the issue - for after all, it matters that people don't know how to write a proper email. This is the only reason Facebook has survived as long as it has. If you want to truly revolutionize communications in this day and age, do something that allows people to use the existing, free, technologies of communication to increase the quality of communication among the masses. Alas, this is a very difficult problem - and like all social ills, the solution is education. The absolute hardest problem there is to solve, out there, today: teaching someone how to use an existing technology to effectively communicate.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
trollkarl 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782
trollkarl 12y ago
No such thing as a free lunch. Telegram hasn't done a very good job of eliminating the possibility of profit. The secret chat feature is actually a marginal use case. By default messages are readable by the back end. In fact, group chats are also reasable by the back end always, and any conversation which can be accessed from multiple devices. And last I heard, the official windows desktop app does not have secret chats. All of these messages are the normal use case on telegram. And the text is being indexed by the back end for easy searching capabilities. So essentially telegram has built a search engine for the conversations of tens of millions of people who are slightly more paranoid and want a secure messenger. Not only that, many of the tens of millions have shared their entire address book with names and phone numbers because the official clients required them to. If they're trying to avoid having valuable information that someone would pay money for, they're not doing a very good job.
dharma1 12y ago
Have been using Telegram for work for a few months now instead of (or in addition to) IRC - it's been very good, the mobile and desktop clients are great. Tested Tox last year but it was super buggy. TextSecure looked good but doesn't seem to have as many users. I think Telegram will keep growing. I just watched Durov's talk with Jimmy Wales from a couple of years back and he comes across like he genuinely cares about ideas that benefit all internet users more so than money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM Still, doesn't seem like a sustainable path to have the messaging infrastructure be a responsibility of one company, both for security and financial reasons. Surely some kind of tox style p2p infrastructure would be better?
- dmix 12y ago
  Interestingly in the talk he showed that VK had 33 million visitors monthly and Telegram apparently already has 35 million. His new project is even more successful.

146 points by bndr 12y ago

wmeredith 12y ago

This raises the obvious question, then who is going to pay for them?

learnstats2 12y ago
Who pays for e-mail?
- maccard 12y ago
  In gmail - ads
- kyllo 12y ago
  E-mail is an open protocol, but clients and hosting are generally not free. You can pay for them, or you can subscribe to ad-supported services where they data-mine your inbox so they can target ads to you. But someone is paying for it.
- Swizec 12y ago
  Private companies big enough to warrant a proper GApps account or their own mail server (or many).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- benihana 12y ago
  With my personal email - google. They handle the costs of storage and transport and in exchange they show me ads and collect high level data. With my work email - my company. They pay to keep the email secure and contextual and in exchange I keep it mostly related to work.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    The cost of storing and transporting e-mail is potentially so low that I would claim you are overpaying Google.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Who pays for e-mail? This is the question of a zen master. In four words you've said more than the entire hagiography of TFA. Yes of course, someone has to pay for electricity, but when using an open protocol the user chooses who pays and what they're paying for. If Facebook could go back in time and kill email, they would in a heartbeat. The communications of free people should not be supervised, whether by dictators or by capitalists.
- api 12y ago
  Google and every other company that invests the immense time and money required to keep it clear of spam. Email without a large spam filtering infrastructure is unusable.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    I used email before there were infrastructure-based spam filters. It was very usable with client-based spam filters. You can't do encrypted email without either a whitelisting system or client-based spam filters.
- deathy 12y ago
  Interesting question. Anyone and everyone. I may host my own email server or I might pay someone to host it. Or the government could host it, or my university could host it. Or I could get it for free by agreeing to be served some ads. But who pays for it doesn't matter. I can send you an email even if we use very different providers (from the point of view of both technology and payment). For messaging I don't see this yet. I feel like XMPP was supposed to be the chosen one. I had a google account but chatted to my gmail contacts through my self-hosted jabber server. I wonder if this new generation of messaging apps will get to that point anytime soon.
andyidsinga 12y ago
users could certainly pay ..but through a donation model similar to public radio or maybe Wikipedia. there's a carefull line to walk if 'sponsors' come on board but it's possible.

alexwebb2 12y ago

This read like an ad for Telegram.

scosman 12y ago
Yeah, but everything's true. Encrypted by default, huge bounty for security researches, fast, great cross platform apps.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Encrypted with their home-grown crypto. Telegram is not fully free and open source. Encryption by default? That has to be new, it was not when I recently checked. And of course there is http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-cryptanalysis-contest http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta... Use Signal/Textsecure, folks.
- unicornporn 12y ago
  > Encrypted by default However, it does not use the end to end encryption "by default". Relevant: https://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/10/its-not-about-the-encryption-its-about-the-encryption-keys/ https://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/10/its-not-about-...
w1ntermute 12y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

tedunangst 12y ago

Woah. Hardcore encryption? Is that even better than military grade encryption?

AngrySkillzz 12y ago
I don't think any reasonable person would refer to Telegram's horrific chimera as "hardcore encryption."

benihana 12y ago

>Secure messaging should be free for everyone. Displaying ads alongside your private communication seems out of place, even immoral I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this service to work without someone footing the bill?

avalaunch 12y ago
It wasn't left out. You must have missed it. Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."
learnstats2 12y ago
The marginal cost of messaging is low enough that phone companies are happy to offer you an incredibly low cost per formerly-private communication (landline or mobile). while the marginal cost of e-mail is so low that we get tonnes of spam. Who needs to pay anything more? We already pay for the infrastructure.
harigov 12y ago
Messaging is important because it provides a person-to-person communication platform for arbitrary data. It blends in the rich interaction capabilities offered by internet with more personalized and free-form interaction offered by telephones or personal visits. Sending text messages to each other is only the first step. One can perform any kind of communication on top of messaging with proper apps. You can charge for these value added services and generate reasonable revenue.
copsarebastards 12y ago
This question is answered rather quickly when you ask two questions: 1. What exactly are people paying for? 2. Is that actually necessary for messaging? If the answer to 1 is servers, the answer to 2 is no: distributed or federated messaging is entirely reasonable and possible to do. If the answer to 1 is paid developers, the answer to 2 is no: there are plenty of developers willing to work on open source. Try it.

inevrela 12y ago

It's either app, or users are the product. When I was in Hong Kong recently, listening to talks about WhatsApp & Facebook, each person using these services was worth +- $48. Sub. fee? Anything like that.

textrmessenger 12y ago

I think the key thing here is that Durov has the money from selling stock in his previous company (12% w/valuation of 3-4 billion) which means he can afford to pay to support the app in the meantime without any external financial help. I do think there are different ways to monetize messaging outside of pushing advertisements into people's face or selling information and third-party paid apps are a good option. In that regard I think the title is misleading: Durov plans to make money through the app eventually, just not through selling people's information or push advertising.

harigov 12y ago
You can always say that the messaging app itself isn't making money but the underlying technology is.
- textrmessenger 12y ago
  I think that is a good point. For start-ups who are interested in making messaging services, I wonder what Durov's recommendation would be as far as financials go. One has to be able to support the team they are working with and there are few people out there who can take the route Durov has due to his financial freedom.
  - harigov 12y ago
    In certain way, cost of doing business has reduced because of cloud service providers. However, network effects and the scale requirements still add up and make it hard for startup's to work on their long term vision. It would be nice if computation was similar to electricity. That way, the onus of paying for the services lies on the end users - the more you use, the more you pay. It is more straightforward and startups can sustain paying themselves for few years without having to worry about paying for computation, storage and network.
caoilte 12y ago
Nobody sets out to do evil but until he creates an ownership structure which prevents himself from cashing in once he's won everyone's trust this is just an underdog doing whatever it takes to attract customers. To be succinct, one day he will sell out and the buyers will have every incentive to make money out of their users.

harunurhan 12y ago

Telegram is a great messaging apps. Private, desktop and web support, fast, better UI compared to WhatsApp. The problem is my friend don't know it so I have to be stuck with WhatsApp for now.

free2rhyme214 12y ago
The fast follower problem.

zanny 12y ago

> "We're trying to create a new type of IT company, one that never focuses on maximising profits, but instead provides value to society," This is dreadful. The Free software movement has existed for decades and Telegram brings nothing new to the table that Google hadn't already a decade ago (open yet crippled protocol, proprietary servers). There is nothing new here, besides the fact that Telegram basically makes no money. Which is also nothing new, since Google Talk and Voice never made money either! I don't mind it, because we know the protocol and can reengineer the clients easily in the event they betray their users trust. It is much better than WhatsApp or Skype being a whole-pipe black box. But at the end of the day, XMPP has existed, has improved, and today provides all the features of all these other messaging transports and more, the problem is there is no money to be had in providing an easy signup XMPP service, so nobody advertises them. Which makes Telegram perplexing, because their only valuable resource is their userbase, and they are not directly monetizing it at all. Contrast that with Duckduckgo having an XMPP server @dukgo.com that basically got a blog post and hasn't been talked about much since, that I use all the time on all my devices. But fundamentally none of this absolves how stupid all these companies re-implement a wheel poorly (XMPP) because the old wheel is so well known and understood that you can't lock people in or profit off the users using it.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
vbezhenar 12y ago
XMPP have troubles with synchronizing chats between clients, with push notifications, with user-friendly mobile clients. I like XMPP, I did set up my own server, but I finally abandoned it. It's usable only with one client, preferably on desktop.
- catern 12y ago
  >synchronizing chats between clients, The Carbons XEP[0] is now fairly widely supported and does exactly this. >user-friendly mobile clients. Conversations[1] is excellent and is free software. >push notifications The centralized system of push notifactions on Android and iOS is not yet supported, it's true, but XMPP with its extensions has pretty good support for battery-constrained devices with intermittent network connections. I use XMPP across multiple devices with my own server to communicate to other people running their own server and it works great. Setting up your own server is extremely easy ("apt-get install prosody" works out of the box on Debian; stay away from ejabberd which is a pain) and I highly recommend it. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve...

aaggarwal 12y ago

Either users will pay with their money or pay with their data (getting ads), else the model is not sustainable. Since, messaging using Internet is being considered here as basic necessity, one could argue that Messaging apps turns to be non-profit organizations or government supported organizations (but anonymous).

joelthelion 12y ago
Costs are very low. If the owners don't want to maximize profit, the service can very well run like this for a very long time.
- aaggarwal 12y ago
  You are only considering the cost of infrastructure. What about the basic salary for the people working on the application and monitoring infrastructure, who will pay for that, if not users and not ads and not government?

bmmayer1 12y ago

Just the opposite. The free software movement has led to apps and programs where the users are the product, not the customer, and companies bend over backwards for advertisers. The companies have no incentive to care about your privacy, just your data. Paid messaging apps, however (at least until they get acquired by advertising companies like Facebook), give companies incentives to service their customers first, and the users are actually the customers. That's why Slack and WhatsApp and HipChat and Basecamp have taken off--because they offer the security and paid customer/company relationship. This article's title is woefully non-conclusive. Sure it would be wonderful if ALL messaging apps could by built and funded by Russian billionaires such they were private and free for the end user, but the fact is that to support the infrastructure of a billion+ user messaging app, you need to make money. And if you can't make money from the users to whom you are promising security and privacy (and thus to whom you owe allegiance), you have to make money elsewhere. And the alternative is arguably what has caused so many security and privacy problems in the first place.

troymc 12y ago
It seems you missed this chunk of the article: <quote>Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."</quote>
- tedunangst 12y ago
  How do you collect rent on an open platform?
  - boomzilla 12y ago
    "How do you make money off search?" -- question by a lot of smart people around 2000.
    - guessbest 12y ago
      The commenter above, bmmayer1, noted advertisers would be how that would be done. I believe a similar method was used with search engines.

deleted 12y ago

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zackmorris 12y ago

I wish there was something like Bitcoin for messaging. Users need a better way to prove their identities (or hide them, depending on the situation) and be able to verify peers. The current hierarchical security system is probably destined to require money, but the free alternatives make me uncomfortable because they tend to need private keys. What I really want is an open version of Skype where the private key can always be generated by the user's mind, overcomes all the limitations like NAT that make users second class netizens, has no central tracker, and (optionally, but possibly required to work around the limitations) allows a certain amount of traffic to be forwarded like Tor. I don't see how we can have a conversation about who pays for messaging when the underlying infrastructure for truly secure online communication hasn't yet gone mainstream. I don't really trust Freenet or Tor and can't quite figure out how come, so maybe we could start there and figure out why that is. And a billion dollars for anything messaging-related completely blows my mind. Most of the world-changing software was developed for a few thousand dollars by a couple of people working in their spare time. To me, paying that much completely misses the point and probably hinders progress by locking capital up in niches that exclude developers who are working towards creating a non-scarcity based economy.

ignoramous 12y ago
https://tox.im https://tox.im ?
- zackmorris 12y ago
  That's really cool, I like how you just give the other user a Tox id token and it sets up the secure channel. I wonder if that's a general approach for secure communication, because as long as it's sent through another secure channel (that may use the traditional SSL certificates from an authority) it could be used to avoid a MITM attack. Maybe a way to do this in the future with an insecure channel is to give the peer your contact token using only context that both of you know. So the above token could get converted to a human-readable string like "that place we met that first time and what you said to me with 12345abcdef on the end" and the other party would have to know you to figure out how to find you. Proving who you are beyond that point would probably involve some back and forth questioning like in spy movies or a video call (which could be faked in 5-10 years with computer rendering) so shared history will be key. It already sounds like it can run over Tor, but it would be nice if it had a standard socket wrapper that could be run over UDP NAT tunneling to look like an SSH VPN. Maybe WebRTC could be integrated with it somehow. I just mean that I'd like the negotiation phase to be separate so that if it works, you're just presented with a secure socket.

boomzilla 12y ago

The team is amazingly technical. Nikolai Durov is a triple IMO gold medallists (and from Russia where selection is much more competitive than most other countries) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov

amelius 12y ago

Messaging services (with say >100k users) should fall under general laws for telecommunications. For instance, this would solve the problem that messaging services don't interface with eachother (lock-in), and it would solve the problem of the provider peeking into any of the messages for whatever reason.

snird 12y ago
But what if I want a messaging service to specifically be disconnected with other services? By your offer, not only that you are forcing me to connect with everyone, you take an essential part of my privacy. Your suggestion is anti-freedom by its core.
zaroth 12y ago
Couldn't disagree more. Regulation has not solved any of these concerns, in fact quite the opposite. Regulation of telecommunication has resulted in some of the biggest and well-seated monopolies on the planet. Please, god, no. Messaging services should fall under exactly one law of the land, and that's the First Amendment.

Animats 12y ago

Is it open source and open protocol? If so, that's what we need. Email was once a bunch of proprietary systems - MCIMail, CompuServ, AOL, etc. It was inconvenient that they didn't interoperate. All those proprietary systems were wiped out by an open one.

fit2rule 12y ago

Since the early 90's, newcomers to the Internet have attempted to monetize the existing phenomenon which the Internet - in all its true free glory - has allowed. There have been countless attempts to 'own email', and before that, 'own Gopher' and 'own Archie' and so on. There was, once, Hotmail. Then came GMail, and then .. Facebook. It's quite possible to maintain your own social network with email alone. You can achieve the same results with a mailing list as you can with the Facebook timeline. The only difference is that you must educate the people in your network to understand how the technology works, and how to operate it in order to function in as effective a manner as is required to maintain a high standard of communication. The fact that this is nearly impossible in the modern context - that you cannot get a group of 200+ people to operate email in the same, standardized manner, is what Facebook - and other mass-communication media - depend upon in order to gain their market share. I would abandon Facebook in 5 minutes if I could be guaranteed that the people I care about - the links in my social network - were as competent at handling the solution as would be required in order to maintain the quality of communication that Facebook currently delivers. Alas, this is not possible - and those who are attempting to monetize and profit from this mass stupidity will do little to address the issue - for after all, it matters that people don't know how to write a proper email. This is the only reason Facebook has survived as long as it has. If you want to truly revolutionize communications in this day and age, do something that allows people to use the existing, free, technologies of communication to increase the quality of communication among the masses. Alas, this is a very difficult problem - and like all social ills, the solution is education. The absolute hardest problem there is to solve, out there, today: teaching someone how to use an existing technology to effectively communicate.

deleted 12y ago

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trollkarl 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782

trollkarl 12y ago

No such thing as a free lunch. Telegram hasn't done a very good job of eliminating the possibility of profit. The secret chat feature is actually a marginal use case. By default messages are readable by the back end. In fact, group chats are also reasable by the back end always, and any conversation which can be accessed from multiple devices. And last I heard, the official windows desktop app does not have secret chats. All of these messages are the normal use case on telegram. And the text is being indexed by the back end for easy searching capabilities. So essentially telegram has built a search engine for the conversations of tens of millions of people who are slightly more paranoid and want a secure messenger. Not only that, many of the tens of millions have shared their entire address book with names and phone numbers because the official clients required them to. If they're trying to avoid having valuable information that someone would pay money for, they're not doing a very good job.

dharma1 12y ago

Have been using Telegram for work for a few months now instead of (or in addition to) IRC - it's been very good, the mobile and desktop clients are great. Tested Tox last year but it was super buggy. TextSecure looked good but doesn't seem to have as many users. I think Telegram will keep growing. I just watched Durov's talk with Jimmy Wales from a couple of years back and he comes across like he genuinely cares about ideas that benefit all internet users more so than money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM Still, doesn't seem like a sustainable path to have the messaging infrastructure be a responsibility of one company, both for security and financial reasons. Surely some kind of tox style p2p infrastructure would be better?

dmix 12y ago
Interestingly in the talk he showed that VK had 33 million visitors monthly and Telegram apparently already has 35 million. His new project is even more successful.