in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

everything having its own complete app is so incredibly Western and capitalist so you can see why China's embrace of the superapp concept is so compatible with their culture/society.

that said, I don't know how we can break people free from the "app fatigue" problem we've created. People just have zero motivation to try anything that will require they spend 30 seconds learning a new app layout.

But they'll spend 6 hours in 30 second increments watching Tiktoks

whole thing sucks and people are not learning from their mistakes because it takes years before their app finally becomes so unusable, intrusive, or finally shutdown. They won't change until they're forced to change, so these companies just boil-the-frog over time.

i hate it

in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

someone should create a bot that harvests all kinds of metadata about the chat members, logs all the conversations, etc for analysis and starts cross referencing it with any other data that can be scraped off the internet.

Invite the bot to the chat under an unassuming name.

Wait a while, and then have it start publishing reports about people exposing their lives and habits and stuff. Then when they are shocked about what they're seeing you can say "this is what Facebook/Meta is learning about you but you choose to keep giving them this information instead of switching to a more private communications app"

Perhaps THAT would wake them up.

(probably not though)

in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

pre-Elon takeover I think Twitter could have evolved into that if they really wanted to.

You can't do it if half the world hates you though.

Amazon at one point could have pulled this off. I'm not sure anyone else in the West could do it at this point. We'd need a universally trusted brand and it's not Big MegaCorp, it's not Social Media Behemoth, and it's definitely not Fintech Banking Startup.

Who is left that is not universally hated?

Walmart and Costco?

in reply to feld

mastodon - Link to source

Andres

@feld I think Google probably had the most chance of success, but they can't design a good UX to save their life. If they could, they've have locked down search (and the web in general), messaging, social media, phones (both the physical devices, voip/SMS, and the OS), shopping, etc. But instead they created weird, confusing (and competing) products that with horrible UIs that they then canceled.

Even Android's UI was pretty bad (imho) for the first decade+.

@feld
in reply to Death by Lambda

pleroma - Link to source

feld

nobody's boycotting Walmart.

If you have to choose between America being dominated by Amazon or Walmart who do you choose?

Everyone picks Walmart. Every time. And Walmart is winning the long game anyway. They have a far superior logistics and supply chain, plus brick and mortar presence.

This doesn't dismiss the very righteous hatred for how they've destroyed small businesses in communities.

But nobody's going after Walmart (or Costco) in the same way they attack other corporations for their behavior. It's just not palatable. They like shopping there too much.

in reply to Martijn Vos

pleroma - Link to source

feld

With email we expect a small subset of features. With social media and instant messaging there are so many ways to do things that an open protocol isn't sufficient because you just end up with massive fragmentation. This is why proprietary apps thrive. They can tightly control the user experience and ensure equity across supported platforms.

XMPP tried this and failed. The XEPs and design-by-committee did not work. Inevitably this led to iMessage and WhatsApp being proprietary XMPP implementations.

The same thing is happening on the Fediverse. Sure, ActivityPub is an open protocol, but you can't view the new Pixelfed Stories on Mastodon or Pleroma; many implementations have emoji reactions but Mastodon does not.

How does an open protocol solve this issue on its own?

see also: Mastodon limitations on polls and post length

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to feld

mastodon - Link to source

Andres

@feld @mcv I'm not sure that I agree that a) embrace & extend is a feature, and that b) open standards can't define a minimum featureset or result in fragmentation. Xmpp being a good example here - fragmentation is huge not due to committee, but by the very idea of a tiny core with a million extensions.

Every jabber server has optional extensions. Every client has a mix of supported extensions. A boon for proprietary users, who use it as a base for their closed systems (googlechat, zoom...)

@Martijn Vos @feld
in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

I'm not saying it's a feature, only that if you have the capability to control the clients on all platforms and the server you can guarantee people have a good experience and never run into weird compatibility issues. You also get the same app/branding on each platform too, so there's no confusion.

Somehow people can figure out that "Outook", "Mail.app", "Gmail" etc are all "email" and compatible with each other, but once you try to get them to use some other open source service where the clients on each device they own are completely different in design and features they just can't figure it out.

"Why can't Flupple on my Mac make a video call to Dogwag on my friend's Android? It says something about incompatible encryption? Why are we bothering with this, why can't we just use Whatsapp" is essentially what you end up with

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

I will say though, this is why I think DeltaChat will persevere and has a high chance of wide adoption vs other open source secure messengers.

They've made a cross-platform Rust core that implements ALL the core functionality and you just have to put a UI on top of it. So they did, and they have 99% feature compatibility across Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, Ubuntu Touch, cli/terminal.... there's even a feature phone (flip phone!) implementation, but it needs to be refreshed as it was mostly just an experiment...

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

Matrix has so many weird issues people don't even realize, like first party clients that have existed for years not implementing all the crypto.

And yes, the server is a dog. It's basically a git repo or a blockchain. The data will grow and grow forever. Deletes don't actually exist; they just get hidden from users with tombstones. And this has a whole nest of other problems from a security perspective: if your Matrix server has open registrations someone can make an account and join a room from another server which imports ALL the data.

Like illegal data. Images and videos you never want to be associated with. But now your server has a permanent copy of them in its database. Forever, or until you nuke the entire server and make a new one.

Good luck trying to explain that one to the Feds doing a no-knock raid on you at 3am.

Matrix IMHO is suitable only for situations where you *need* the data to be permanently stored as an audit trail // immutable, like corporate and government internal communications.

It doesn't make sense for IoT like they tried to advertise. And it is not a good fit for regular people's needs.

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