There are tons of smaller XMPP or Matrix providers that didn't get access to millions in funding from these big corporations like Signal did. Who have to run a business in a way that requires paying customers from the start. But now that cash is tight (and after they built a sizable user base) and they can no longer just outspend the competition, suddenly they remind you of TANSTAAFL and are asking you to cough up the cash.
It is the same shitty playbook used by VC-funded companies, except that is now dressed as some virtuous thing of "looked at how much it cost to build all this..." It makes some emotional appeal but it tries to hide from the audience that these costs are solely due to them insisting on controlling everything.
If it is so expensive to run Signal, then open it up to let other people run their own servers instead of trying to control everything. Don't give me this bullshit of "we are a non-profit but we are in the same lane of big tech corporations". You are there because it served you. You can not have it both ways.
If you know of a good open architecture that solves the problems of spam and impersonation while maintaining the convenience and ease of use necessary for mass adoption, please share it.
Screw "convenience". It's a poison pill. "Convenience" should never be put above "resilience" (not to mention "freedom") in a value scale. The American obsession with "convenience" is turning us all into cattle and it's getting harder and harder to get the rest of society to function without being controlled by some corporate overlord.
That’s more than even I believe. I just think nobody in the OSS space has put the work in to figure it out yet.
> I could get my parents who are nearing their 70s to use Element (Matrix) and it took them less than 10 minutes, even with me asking them to register to a non-default homeserver.
Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
And as for the desire for convenience, it’s hard to imagine you seriously believe that only Americans value convenience over resilience. If that were true, the rest of the world would be using Element rather than WhatsApp.
Simply railing against people’s needs doesn’t change them.
> Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
Yet they manage just fine to get a sales rep from Best Buy to help them setup FaceTime on their shiny iPhones that they get to buy every two years. Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
I don’t think I got you wrong at all - you’ve just reiterated that it isn’t as convenient, and can’t be made so.
> Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
No reason. If some organization was willing to pay Best Buy to do that, I’m expect they would.
It can in principle, but not in practice. To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.
What happened to open source?
> The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.
That’s a fair point, in that if consumers prioritized open infrastructure over convenience, a commercial enterprise would too. However this is back to the earlier point - there is no point railing about that. It’s just a fact that most people want to just buy the nicest thing they can with their money.
Open source is not magic fairy dust that can solve everything. You still need funding for developers, you still need to acquire customers to provide a feedback cycle, you still need device makers making it easy to install your app, etc.