For the people who suggest users just change apps. Imagine I just ban all your current forms of text communication (you can still have e-mail), but only you, your family and friends will keep their ecosystems. Do you care you won’t talk to them anymore? Can you convince them to use a new app? Does it affect your life beyond social interactions? Is it worth making your life harder?
Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it’s a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn’t be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.
I can’t speak for everybody obviously but from what I’ve noticed people around here aren’t overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn’t really matter, you use what you need. There’s nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing and it doesn’t have to be a hard switch all at once.
There’s no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn’t whether it’s opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn’t make a good nor convincing argument. Here’s a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies’ post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users’ metadata, and more resilient than today’s Signal.
I know that diversification has its advantages. I’m a firm believer in it, and I think it’s one of the main reasons to which Linux for example owes its resilience and flexibility. But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product’s benefits to become known and widespread. Linux is a general purpose product which was able to find multiple niches in which to thrive. But other products have a much more narrow scope, and sometimes if they miss their window of opportunity they’re relegated to the subnotes of history forever.
I believe that’s what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on. At some point there was an opportunity to move with the times and add popular features and become user-friendly but they didn’t, and commercial products that could offer those thrived instead. We as geeks would often like to think it’s all because of the marketing power of wealthy companies, but we scoff at the notion of “user friendly”. Let’s look at Telegram and how well it’s doing in spite of having neither the marketing power of Meta or Apple, nor the technical advantages of XMPP or Signal.
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too, and which Mozilla is currently trying to address. If the Lemmy community doesn’t put some effort soon into addressing its outstanding issues that prevent easy adoption by new users, it will eventually fade into obscurity and become just as obscure as XMPP.
For cross-protocols messaging? Sure! But it has its flaws (for instance, only message bodies are encrypted, which makes XMPP’s OMEMO a superior solution in 1:1 and small groupchats). Also, it tackles only a small part of the problem, the larger picture (and problem) is about how the different protocols should inter-operate (exchange handshakes, keys, …), and this is nowhere near ready yet: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/
Telegram is the same. It’s the app people will migrate to because it’s the app people learned to use when WhatsApp can’t operate for some reason. Not many people there. People here are overly attached.
For the people who suggest users just change apps. Imagine I just ban all your current forms of text communication (you can still have e-mail), but only you, your family and friends will keep their ecosystems. Do you care you won’t talk to them anymore? Can you convince them to use a new app? Does it affect your life beyond social interactions? Is it worth making your life harder?
Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it’s a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn’t be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.
I can’t speak for everybody obviously but from what I’ve noticed people around here aren’t overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn’t really matter, you use what you need. There’s nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing and it doesn’t have to be a hard switch all at once.
There’s no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn’t whether it’s opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
I will let Moxie answer that: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn’t make a good nor convincing argument. Here’s a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies’ post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users’ metadata, and more resilient than today’s Signal.
I know that diversification has its advantages. I’m a firm believer in it, and I think it’s one of the main reasons to which Linux for example owes its resilience and flexibility. But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product’s benefits to become known and widespread. Linux is a general purpose product which was able to find multiple niches in which to thrive. But other products have a much more narrow scope, and sometimes if they miss their window of opportunity they’re relegated to the subnotes of history forever.
I believe that’s what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on. At some point there was an opportunity to move with the times and add popular features and become user-friendly but they didn’t, and commercial products that could offer those thrived instead. We as geeks would often like to think it’s all because of the marketing power of wealthy companies, but we scoff at the notion of “user friendly”. Let’s look at Telegram and how well it’s doing in spite of having neither the marketing power of Meta or Apple, nor the technical advantages of XMPP or Signal.
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too, and which Mozilla is currently trying to address. If the Lemmy community doesn’t put some effort soon into addressing its outstanding issues that prevent easy adoption by new users, it will eventually fade into obscurity and become just as obscure as XMPP.
That’s why I’m rooting for RCS.
For cross-protocols messaging? Sure! But it has its flaws (for instance, only message bodies are encrypted, which makes XMPP’s OMEMO a superior solution in 1:1 and small groupchats). Also, it tackles only a small part of the problem, the larger picture (and problem) is about how the different protocols should inter-operate (exchange handshakes, keys, …), and this is nowhere near ready yet: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/
Telegram is the same. It’s the app people will migrate to because it’s the app people learned to use when WhatsApp can’t operate for some reason. Not many people there. People here are overly attached.