Isn’t the problem profit motive? Wikipedia is a foundation, so it works the same way it always has. We need this for more basic services like messaging and identity

I've always thought the solution should be an open federated IM standard, like email but for conversations rather than correspondence. If that were the widely adopted solution, you'd end up with large free providers that work perfectly fine for most regular users (like gmail), paid services that fully respect your privacy, and the more technical folks would be free to host their own servers.

I guess Matrix is doing this, but unfortunately, the way history has played out, centralized IM had first mover advantage by a huge margin and that's what people are used to now - that a messenger is an application on your phone that you can only use to contact other users of that same application.

You can donate to Signal too. What has to happen until people realize they should be willing to pay a little money for a service?

We've actually witnessed that people _are_ willing to pay for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix after a long time of illegal torrents. How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?

People were willing to pay for WhatsApp. It was exactly that simple, honest, high quality independent paid chat app you are alluding to, back in 2010 or so.

Iirc, it was 1€, and maybe it was even only on iOS.

I remember vaguely getting convinced by a friend, "you just payed [200,300,idk]€ for that new phone, can't pay one euro for this one app?"

> How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?

We can't, because those two things are in direct opposition. Piracy was less convenient and offered fewer features that people wanted, so they moved to platforms that were more convenient. The current giants (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp...) are more convenient than their alternatives (generic email, Mastodon, Signal...) and so the pressure is not to move, but in fact to stay.

In general, the pressure is always decentralised->centralised, which is exactly what torrents->Netflix was. Even if we had infinite funds to offer people distributed services for free forever, we would still need to make them more convenient than their current centralised ones - if on top of not being more convenient, we also want to charge them, I see no reason why the average person would ever want to switch.

I think part of the problem is the network effect. Social networks want to maximize the number of users so that anyone can connect to you on Facebook, Twitter, etc. The lowest barrier to entry is free, and that usually means ad supported (and personalized ads for the most revenue).

Maybe there's some space for a freemium model (IIRC one of the questions asked during the Facebook hearing was whether they could add a paid ad-free option) but so far that hasn't happened.

Paid still needs to answer to shareholders

The motives could be many. While Wikipedia is a so called non-profit foundation it has its one biases and various groups use it to push various agendas including political agendas.

But this is all transparent thanks to edit logs, and there are plenty of tireless editors patrolling to revert excessive agenda pushing.

The foundation is (mostly) not responsible for content moderation though. They mostly do software development.

The problem isn't silos, it's lack of privacy. Signal solves that problem.

Signal isn't 100% private: you need a phone number, and you can't use on a computer unless you install the app on the phone first.

It’s not anonymous, but anonymity isn’t equivalent to privacy.

I have started to migrate from WhatsApp to iMessage with Apple and Signal with Android users. At least not a single silo...

Can you clarify what you mean by a "silo"? Do you mean once you start using Signal you're stuck in Signal, and you can't export all your messages into another app?

If the backend is open source then there is recourse.

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Is there a readymade docker install ?

There's no point installing it as you can't use it. It's just provided for transparency. Not to run a home server like with matrix.

Yes it is: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Telegram's backend is closed-source.

Yeah, but your instance can't communicate with other Signal server instances, so it's pointless.

No it's not pointless. It might just be pointless for the "socializing with random people" use case.

Yes it is, because you can't join two servers at the same time. You run your own server, I run mine and we can't communicate until one of us decides to drop our whole network and join the other server.

That's fine. As I mentioned, the use case you are talking about makes this pointless.

Someone that needs a special set of phones to be able to communicate securely and not be reliant on a publicly run server? Here's a non pointless use case.

I'll let imagine who might run something like that.

True but you have to consider the app needs to be user friendly to see any real adoption...

Don't get me wrong, I love Riot (or whatever it's called these days) but it's just not user-friendly for your average Joe...

Honestly if they just picked a different emoji collection, I would be happy.

Pssh ... kids these days.

And what's nice is the multitude of clients you can use, from rather feature-complete (official app) to relatively user-friendly (ex: Pattle)

https://matrix.org/clients/

And unlike Signal, you can host your own server (Synapse) instance and be truely independent with the ability to join the federated network.

Users want centralized services. Syncing across devices and shared history are mandatory features, and are basically impossible to do well in distributed models.

I have never lost a matrix message (but I am fed up with e2e warning and new session weird insecure messages) but I have come to the conclusion than Signal isn't reliable since it sometimes lose messages. It's no-no.

Yeah the e2e is way too complex in matrix. They really need to work on the UX and make it more like WA and Signal. The way it is now even a crypto geek like me gets annoyed and that means the mainstream will never touch it.