[rohan1024]

The sooner they take such actions the better it is for everyone in the long run. Someone somewhere will come up with an alternative that is better than anything we have today. And sorry but Signal is not the pinnacle of messaging.

I like what Matrix is doing but they are far away from becoming mainstream. Within 2-3 years a new platform will rise and it will fix flaws of existing messaging apps. This will then be followed by social media but it might take another 6-7 years to fix that mess.

[swiley]

God dammit we've had standards that work. Apple and Google are responsible for killing all of the decent messaging protocols by censoring the clients from their app stores.

When smartphones came out people modified IRC with support for push brokers and message replay but because of app stores this means push brokers for community maintained clients have to be maintained by the individual volunteer paying (yes! paying, shut up about the free dev accounts they don't allow you to send push notifications) for the "privilege" of submitting the app (meaning they have low to zero availability.) The relay Mozilla maintains allows servers and users to choose who brokers push messages but Apple and Google screw over their users for profit and this is the result.

Smartphone app stores have made IM unusable.

[themacguffinman]

This is a stretch for Android at least, Google charges a one-time $25 fee for a Play Store developer account and provides unlimited push notifications for no extra charge.

[twobitshifter]

I just installed element today (the new name for riot) It’s interesting and may have some features like rooms that will build interest outside of just being an IM tool. I do miss the days of AIM/Jabber/Google Talk/ where everything just worked. Bringing that experience to phones should be the goal rather than jumping from service to service.

My friends from Europe and Brazil are locked into WhatsApp, my American friends seem to prefer FB messenger. They’re really using 2 versions of the same company’s products which are “incompatible” at this point. Facebook could make them compatible with one another and with each other only OR they could do the socially beneficially thing and use an open protocol. Unless employees at FB push for this, they’re likely to take the former route.

[RHSeeger]

Or, more likely, someone will buy it and screw it up. That's pretty much par for the course.

[upofadown]

>Within 2-3 years a new platform will rise and it will fix flaws of existing messaging apps.

And then 2-3 years after that an entirely incompatible platform will do the same thing...

[CerealFounder]

Curious to all those family power users. What would you want to see in the next gen WhatsApp?