I tried hard to push XMPP back in its day. Little success sadly, that was when IM was going out of style in favor of SMS. I kept using Trillian and watching as more and more contacts went offline never to return. Then Google announced they were killing their XMPP gateway and that was a nail in the coffin.
The bigger problem with XMPP was varying support of various XEPs leading to an uneven user experience with mismatched clients. That in itself was fixable, and not a problem for people like us, but it became a problem when trying to get 'normies' interested. Tell someone like us 'you can't video chat that guy, his client doesn't have calling capability' and that makes perfect sense. Tell an average person that, and they hear 'this system sucks and I can't count on it to do what I want, I should stop using it'. Then they go on Discord or iMessage or whatever, and it works right the first time every time, and they stay.
And therein lies the real problem. You and I can wax poetic about the pros and cons of this or that system and its security, but if I can't get my non-cryptohead friends to use it, then it's worthless.
And THAT is why Signal succeeded and XMPP failed. Because it's dead fucking simple to set up. Download the app, punch in the SMS security code, and you're online. Questions like 'choose which client software you want' or 'pick which instance you want to sign up with' kill adoption for average non-techie people. They say 'I don't know what to choose, I don't want to choose wrong and cause a bigger problem, so I'll just not choose and close this'.
A call phone might be the answer. Many phones use OLED screens, meaning an app that sends your calendar to the watch with no extra hardware might be possible.
Whatever you say asshole.
A moron like you has no idea on how arguments should work.
Your self righteous infographic is just arrogant.
I know how to argue far better than you do.
I get in many arguments and I almost always win them.
You talk about disagreement, but your pyramid only works when both people are arguing in good faith.
You say that attacking the central point of an argument is the most effective, but often the stated central point is not the central point at all, especially with emotion based positions. For example, a more conservative person arguing against liberal changes will state specific objections to these changes, but arguing those objections is futile if the real underlying objection is simple fear of change.
Personally I don't think it's likely that signal will close, or that they will sell out.
I think the more likely problem is the sort of thing I mentioned, that having a single dev team will be a bottleneck or will reduce user choice.
The iOS backup thing I mentioned is one example of that. Usernames rather than phone numbers is another one.
Having only one code base does make it easier to audit. And having one foundation in charge does mean there's an easy path to pay for those audits. But it is still a single point of failure.
To be clear- as single point of failure go, I trust Signal more than the next 10 put together. What I don't trust is the whole using phone numbers and SMS verification for sign up. And I would prefer their architecture was a bit more open/federated.
From what I've seen of the people in charge of Signal- they'd probably close before they sell out.
That said, you make a very good point. Having all the registered users in one place, is a vulnerability. A great many of us have non technical friends/partners/siblings/coworkers/etc; and encouraging them to use ANYTHING new is pulling teeth. So Signal is great, but it's still eggs in one basket- if they do something user-unfriendly or sell out or close, we are back to square one in begging/pleading/cajoling people to (please) try this (much better) app.
I've also lost a few people who used Signal over one stupid problem- the iOS version has no backup/restore function. If you lose your phone, or uninstall the app, all your saved chats are gone and there's no way to get them back. Android version at least has a useful backup/restore.
Exactly.
This is Elon hate-porn. Some people LOVE to hate on Elon and make it out like every misstep he does is a DISASTER AND THE MELTDOWN WILL HAPPEN ANY MINUTE NOW!!!!. No it's not. Twitter is alive and well. Some heavy users are pissed I'm sure. But the whole 'running it into the ground' thing just isn't happening.
If you disagree, my answer is simple- try using it. It works. Articles like this paint an awful picture of a service circling the drain that's gonna go bankrupt any minute now. It's clickbait, an article trashing him pandering to a bunch of people who hate him and want to see him fail.
To be clear- I disagree with a lot of what Elon's doing at Twitter. I understand he wants to monetize AI scraping, but I also think that if he wants Twitter to be the 'public square' it has to stay, you know, public. As in no registration required, Google can index.
But I have no need to hate on the guy. If he runs Twitter into the ground or pisses users off too much, Mastodon and other fediverse platforms win. If he succeeds, then good for him. No skin off my back either way.
Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole.
Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down.
I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I tried hard to push XMPP back in its day. Little success sadly, that was when IM was going out of style in favor of SMS. I kept using Trillian and watching as more and more contacts went offline never to return. Then Google announced they were killing their XMPP gateway and that was a nail in the coffin.
The bigger problem with XMPP was varying support of various XEPs leading to an uneven user experience with mismatched clients. That in itself was fixable, and not a problem for people like us, but it became a problem when trying to get 'normies' interested. Tell someone like us 'you can't video chat that guy, his client doesn't have calling capability' and that makes perfect sense. Tell an average person that, and they hear 'this system sucks and I can't count on it to do what I want, I should stop using it'. Then they go on Discord or iMessage or whatever, and it works right the first time every time, and they stay.
And therein lies the real problem. You and I can wax poetic about the pros and cons of this or that system and its security, but if I can't get my non-cryptohead friends to use it, then it's worthless.
And THAT is why Signal succeeded and XMPP failed. Because it's dead fucking simple to set up. Download the app, punch in the SMS security code, and you're online. Questions like 'choose which client software you want' or 'pick which instance you want to sign up with' kill adoption for average non-techie people. They say 'I don't know what to choose, I don't want to choose wrong and cause a bigger problem, so I'll just not choose and close this'.