Comment by ezst

Comment by ezst 11 hours ago

Signal don't want you to build 3rd party clients and integrations, they are another fully centralised product meant to capture and lock users into what signal believes is better for them. That's the whole "we love opensource but we won't merge your PRs and might lock your account out of the network for using forked clients that got rid of features like crypto that you might not like". I'm still sour for all the bad faith placating "the ecosystem is moving" post by Moxie and the lame excuse for not supporting federation. And no, I'm not finding it hard to onboard family and friends onto secure XMPP clients and accounts.

frollogaston 11 hours ago

XMPP was a well intended idea but a bad protocol. Sure federation is good, but they needed a proper standard instead of making everything an optional extension that C2S and S2S never agree on. Like getting the right auth and encryption is even messier than on email.

Also, XML was the wrong choice. Pissed me off as a dev, back when I was doing stuff with ejabberd.

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ezst 43 minutes ago

That's the kind of "compelling in theory, irrelevant in practice" comment I would make if I had no/obsolete experience with XMPP. It just works, with a healthy and thriving ecosystem of compatible client/server implementations developed independently by many organisations (small and large) around the world. At the user-level, it's just plug and play. As a developer, you don't even have to see any XML (you can deserialize your stanzas into whatever higher-level/prettier construct the programming language/stack your product depends on)

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EasyMark 10 hours ago

I'm glad you aren't finding it hard. I can't even get people to move from Whatsapp and Messenger over to Signal. Only computer geeks seem to care or bother, so that's who is on my Signal list.

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ezst 35 minutes ago

That's why I skip the Signal intermediate stage plain and simple: once Signal inevitably enshittifies (a property of centralised services), the people you painfully brought there will no longer kindly listen to you when, lesson learned, you will try to pull them into federated services.
For anyone else (i.e. the majority, which already has 2-5-10 messaging services on their device depending on how you count), quicksy.im does a decent job at emulating the onboarding experience of phone-based social graphs (WhatsApp & al.) and substantially lowers the barrier to being reachable over XMPP.

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