I'm crying. Remember when messaging was built on open platforms and standards like XMPP and IRC? The golden year(s?) when Google Talk worked with AIM and anyone could choose whatever client they preferred?
Welcome to the future friends when we must pay to battle the keymasters and gatekeepers on their terms to do what we used to do ourselves, for free.
First they took my RSS, then they took my XMPP... Who can guess whats next?
We can take back the internet. We've been at a disadvantage for so long because centralized services are easier to build great experiences with than federated services. Messaging protocols require identities, and federated identities are user-hostile. They worked once: email. Never again.
Luckily, we're in the middle of a decentralization renaissance. Instead of managing your identity on a server controlled by Facebook or your XMPP host, you can manage your identity on a blockchain controlled by no one. We can build identities that any app can use. When it comes to network effects, federation loses to centralization, but centralization loses to decentralization.
Pick up the tools—Ethereum and IPFS—and start building systems without gatekeepers. We will win.
You're right about UX being central to the problem, but you're missing a major part of it here.
UX is hard. Getting great user experience takes IMHO a lot more pain than getting algorithms and systems to work right (in most cases). UX is about endless revisions, a lot of boring and often ugly code, obsessing about pixels and quirky details of your UI's "story," and other things that are very time consuming, not fun, and that the vast majority of programmers hate doing.
As a result, people generally have to be paid to work on UX.
This is doubly true because most nerds don't need great UX. They know how things work and can use "raw" hacker projects from the command line. So there's really no motive in most cases. "Works for me."
Until and unless there is an economic model for a less centralized less winner-take-all Internet economy, vertically integrated closed silos will continue to dominate if for no other reason than the fact that they can pay people to do the boring tedious work that separates a nerd project from an app non-nerds want to use.
Edit: It's really always been about UX to some extent. Personal computing won back in the 70s and 80s because it offered far superior user experience to closed silo mainframes. But the Internet and especially mobile have changed the game pretty dramatically. Now closed silos are winning because they offer superior user experience.
But isn't that exactly where countless free and paid clients/apps of varying quality for the user to choose from would come in handy? Take RSS as an example - the technology as open for everyone, but as a profit-seeking company you can still seduce with high-quality, polished client / feed reader. Of course, that option would be open to any number of freelancers, one-man-operations and other indie developers, not just the Googles and Facebooks of this world. A great thing for the enduser, not necessarily a desirable outcome for the mentioned companies.
This is pretty much why the very common failure state of these open technologies is that some company gets very close to perfecting the UX, pulls in a vast majority of the possible users in that space, then slowly abandons the open technology for closed replacements, thus locking in those users that thought they were buying into the open system. (Google Reader, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, ...)
Agreed! Economic models for funding decentralized apps are the key barrier to liberating our network effects from the companies who have fenced them off. I spend my days trying to solve that problem. I'll post on /r/Ethereum soon when there's something people can use.
IMHO this is The Problem, and is far more significant than the problems IPFS or even cryptocurrencies are trying to solve. I would stop short of calling these projects wasted effort, but solving the economic model is a prerequisite to any chance of success for the entire endeavor.
It's not entirely a technical problem. At some point I think a few sacred ideas will need to be questioned, such as the idea that open source must also be "free as in beer."
If there is no economic model, nothing is going to happen. Closed silos will continue to dominate in all the areas that cost money, and among those UX is probably the most significant differentiator that will guarantee their dominance. I love open source gift culture but there are some pretty severe limits to what can practically be accomplished without some source of capital or subsidy.
General purpose blockchains are social clay: you can model any economic interaction on them, then people can engage in that interaction without any company's assistance or permission. I think I have a model that incentivizes crowds to direct their efforts and funds like a non-profit.
It might not work, but if it does, no one can stop those crowds. If I find a new shiny object to chase, the software will keep running as long as people want to use it. We can reshape our world with software that can't be stopped.
We've strayed too far off topic, but you and any readers should feel free to email me anytime. It's in the profile.
The current market cap for all cryptocurrencies is less than $8B, which means that about 75% of all cryptocurrency would have to be focused on the sort of thing you describe to have a chance of competing with Facebook's $5.8B 2015 revenue.
This comparison doesn't make any sense to me. Why should comparing the yearly revenue of a company to the market cap of cryptocurrencies tell us anything at all? They're not even measuring the same type of thing.
I believe sandstorm.io has bigger chances to create a federation renaissance. It makes hosting your own cloud easy. It is also more efficient than p2p technology.
And XMPP has consistently been behind on innovation. I used IRC and Jabber for a really long time. I don't know how long I was waiting for basic audio and video chat in XMPP, which is now a standard thing in almost all proprietary communication systems. People have been wanting those features for a very long time and they migrated away from the open systems because they were consistently behind on features.
I don't understand why open seems to immediately mean better and proprietary is bad. I'm all for an open system if the benefit is clear, but it often makes no difference and ultimately comes down to how the project/software is managed. There are a lot of "open" software products that are controlled by a few and thus, not very open.
I don't think what you write makes sense really. Sure, XMPP has been behind on innovation. Companies using it had four choices: wait for X, implement solution in XMPP and publish it, implement solution in XMPP silently, reimplement everything including X.
Well, we ended up with tens of platforms with X, so obviously companies went with one of the latter two solutions. We know a few of the companies did continue with XMPP and modified ejabberd, so they definitely did XMPP implementation of video for example. Yet, they decided not to publish anything, so globally we're stuck in the same place again.
Similar thing happened to HTML with ages of stagnation. Now we finally standardise what's implemented instead of implementing what's standardised. I don't see how XMPP itself is an issue. Don't like that they're slow? Use your own extension and publish it. Either everyone will use the same solution, or you'll learn why it sucks.
Never mind audio/video, the group chat UX for Jabber still sucks, as does the experience when logging in from multiple devices (something you'd think tech people would have caught onto early).
This is one reason why I have been resisting signing up on various mobile chat apps like whatsapp. My family and friends use it and they get shocked when I keep refusing to sign up on these things.
I do feel excluded from various online chats but for anything important, they text, call, or email me. So perhaps it is not too bad. I end up saving time by avoid gossip and funny videos.
Exactly, I am not using Whatsapp, I used to use it one year back but then again not much important stuff happened on Whatsapp, it was the same story everywhere, people ignored me outright, only called me when they needed help and never otherwise.
It is a relief not looking at the phone every minute of the day despite the fact that nothing important is going to be communicated via whatsapp, or nothing of that significance to me, everything that I really really need to know comes to me via call
I think what’s needed is an open chat protocol that also works well in mobile settings, since that’s where a huge chunk of the potential user base is these days.
Telegram's protocol is built with mobile in mind: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto - I believe their implementation of server-side is closed-source, but remember seeing an open-source version somewhere on GitHub...?
I don't think this is enough, because it assumes that all clients are connected to the same server. What we need is something federated (like XMPP) and with a design that is reasonable for mobile.
No, I’m afraid they wouldn’t. That’s also a big part of the problem. What’s the incentive for a large player like FB to use an open chat protocol? Not much, it seems :-/
When you're small, you have no users, and need to start gathering network effects. So you champion and implement protocols that allow you to interoperate with other networks. You start to eat other companies lunches as you provide a better product.
As you get larger, that same interoperability starts to become a liability as other networks start eating in to your userbase. So you cut out interoperability and start building a walled garden.
That's one thing that I worry about, though. The superior product experience is coming from new centralized services such as Slack and Discord. It's not coming from those building something decentralized.
The timing of this post feels so weird. Yesterday I was running a script that purged my facebook activity completely, and I was in the middle of setting up an xmpp messenger on my tablet just so I can communicate with people using that platform. Then I've noticed that the api is gone, with no way to connect but their official app.
Guess I'll just tell everyone that matters my phone number and mail address, if they do not already know, and call it a day. I've wasted so much of my time and attention on facebook.
Meh, this is just MSN all over again. This seems to be some kind of weird cycle the Internet goes through, I'm sure eventually an open protocol will thrive...we're just not there yet.
I've been trying to figure out where Facebook chat is going to end up -- the only thing I care about: will there be a way for me to build a simple, command-line client that can use an API/interface that's document and won't disappear over night? As far as I can gather the answer from Facebook is: "Fuck off! This is a revenue platform for us, and we're too big to care about any additional network effects a more open system could generate."
Of the current crop of messaging platforms, I'm cautiously leaning on Signal (it works with sms, I might get some of the people I actually communicate to use it -- even if I would prefer it was more federation/multi-server/self-host friendly) and http://www.mattermost.org/ for an xmmp/irc/etc work-a-like.
I've given up the idea of using IM with facebook users, iMessage users, or Google hangout users. I might occasionally use slack or gitter[1] via the irc interface, or very rarely via the awful web interface (not they're any worse than other web interfaces, but it's just as gaudy and slow and insecure as other web apps, by virtue of being a web app (image libraries, font rendering have issues, they require downloadable code (js) to run -- they can be expected to have a security record comparable to MS office documents with macros enabled)).
I somehow don't see the irc interface to gitter and slack as being good ways to integrate with a single Android app though. Maybe mattermost will help with that, so I can have one app that does sane IM+SMS, and one that does email. Hopefully without the "5 different accounts that can't talk with each other"-nonsense of having separate AIM, XMPP, MS messenger accounts in a single monster-client. It was barely tolerable on the desktop, I won't abide it on my cell phone.
I am indeed sad people couldn't just get together and agree on a sane XMPP sub-set with client-server and server-server TLS, and optional server-side message storage.
But that didn't happen, so now I'll just be without a "big" messaging/chat service (other than IRC, IRC still works).
Yep, it's not like we don't have open protocols with millions of users. Data silos and super nodes in the network are a socio-economic effect, not technical. What I mean is that as long as it's desirable to become a high traffic, high authority node, there will be people (and corporations) spending time and money to build them -- I think it's an emergent property of human society + resource scarcity.
Unfortunately, every open-protocol chat implementation attempted thus far has failed due to commoditization and spam. Nobody has been able to figure out a way to make them still useful to the masses.
Welcome to the future friends when we must pay to battle the keymasters and gatekeepers on their terms to do what we used to do ourselves, for free.
First they took my RSS, then they took my XMPP... Who can guess whats next?