On 5/11/18, Alex <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 11 May 2018 14:49:37 +0000 > Carsten Mattner <[email protected]> wrote: > >> and then there's Signal's voice chat, but Signal is Signal and I >> cannot use it for multiple reasons anyway. > > Other than Signal being centralized, what problems do you see? Why > are you unable to use it?
1. no proper native desktop client 2. disagreement over how Moxie handles criticism and follows the rule of "dissuading" alternative implementation to keep control and compatibility in check. 3. the inability to use without a phone number and the loss of the profile when phone number becomes unoperational 4. no federation with anything, caused mainly by (2) 5. its SPoF Signal servers for circumventing local regimes or store and forward of messages when receiver is offline 6. their clients are slow and bulky and isolated, not integrating with anything else 7. another closed system trying to grab users, leading to users signing up at another system to connect with friends. And now we have Discord getting popular. This has to stop before it becomes normality and everyone forgets why P2P was pursued, but building a closed messenger is a business rather than a service to users. They know that building a P2P system that can have 100's of different servers and clients makes no money, so nobody invest in the idea. Yes, I've tried Matrix, and right now it's a hot mess. Tox and Ring equally or even worse. Yet, convenience trumps and people use Kik and Snapchat for sexting with strangers. Even if 2-7 wouldn't be issues, I can't use a tool day to day which doesn't have native desktop clients to choose from. The way OTR works, XMPP doesn't care and I can use any server or set up my own without running into problems when connecting chatting with other users. Those users don't have to sign up or use a different tool. Heck, even IRC+OTR is better in that regard than the popular messaging services. Bittorrent is still going strong, yet we still have no DHT based true P2P messaging solution in wide use. At least with XMPP, we're not bound to a single server but can interoperate and move around like in real life. When I move around with XMPP, my contacts just need to add my new id to their roster, they don't have to install a new client or sign up somewhere. The cynic in me thinks that there's powers that prefer centralized solutions that can be controlled while doing so for true P2P would require bad mouthing the service like they did Bittorrent and Tor. You know, "only .... use P2P". It's high time P2P is adopted in commercial mainstream tools for it to lose its stigma it acquired in the last decade. XMPP+OTR is the practical middle ground we can get for the moment. _______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev
