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submitted 1 year ago by bbbhltz@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
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[-] Trebach@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

He was also unwilling to allow other apps to interact with Signal servers, even if they supported a platform that he wasn't going to support. Good riddance to him.

[-] alexland@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I understand and value the idea of self-hosting or federation to decentralize services, but Signal is currently my most used chat app for the sole reason that I can tell a friend to go download it and it just works. Supporting self-hosted servers or federation doesn't necessarily mean that the UX has to be bad, but for small organizations I think the radical focus on a specific experience is the best way to make a good product, and if this is the sacrifice that was made so that we could have a simple, reliable, private messenger then I'm happy with that tradeoff.

As an example, chat protocols/implementations like Matrix have a lot of potential, but the foundational decisions around decentralization mean that it takes way more work to make it seamless to use. You can't download a client and start chatting immediately, you need to think about what server to connect to, and that's already enough of a barrier to make it a no-go for a lot of the folks I regularly chat with who just don't care enough about privacy/FOSS to put in the effort.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
122 points (100.0% liked)

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