LINE ( http://line.me/en/ ) is massive in Asia and some European markets.

How'd you get your friends to move over to Telegram? I'm trying to get that ball moving with my circle of friends.

Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service.

If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.

Even distributed protocols aren't a silver bullet. Embrace and extend can make short work of that. As can joining standards boards and playing political games. As can simply turning off federation.

Sometimes I think HTTP and SMTP are only limping along because there's a large enough enterprise base that doesn't want to see any changes at all.

Maybe that presents a defense (get your competing protocol entrenched in corporate IT), but not many technologies get birthed out to the consumer space from the enterprise space the way http and smtp did.

I think the problem is that historically, we only ever collectively solved the email server. It's unfortunate that we didn't solve the more general case of communication through a server hub. We shouldn't have email addresses, we should have connection addresses, that provide access to mail, chat, audio, video, whatever.

There's no such thing as a decentralized conmunications tool. Even email requires the centralization provided by ICANN.

You can send email without using DNS.

I'm not sure I'd call IP addresses centralised, if perhaps you were thinking of ICANN's running of IANA?

If you consider the internet inherently "centralised" then surely you'd still find CB radio or similar to be decentralised. Or do you also consider the allocation of wavebands to be "centralised"?

Depends on how far you want to push the definition of decentralized. The routing infrastructure of the Internet is still fairly centralized as is the allocation of IP addresses.

Making a messaging service successful requires huge amounts of time and effort. If it's so decentralized that it cannot even be acquired, how could it get built?

To be clear, I don't doubt that the technical side is very feasible. It's the user acquisition side that seems improbable except as a commercial venture.

I suppose that is its own form of decentralization.

I didn't... they started showing up on my contact list. I then found out that they read about the app on the newspaper.

Just started using Telegram, it's awesome and so fast. Also their desktop apps are very useful.

Is there some reason people don't like sms?

per-message billing by telcos, high costs for international messages, no identity management (only tied to phone #), not cross-platform, character limits (MMS, the workaround, is historically janky), no delivery confirmation, lack of end-to-end encryption. Shall I go on?

the only thing it has going for it (and it's a big one) is ubiquity.

I see. No one I text pays per message or is in a different country. I'm not sure what you mean by "cross-platform", since every phone you can buy supports it as far as I know. The character limit is a small issue. The delivery confirmation is a bigger issue to me. I don't care about end-to-end encryption when one of those ends is a major company that has ties to state-sponsored surveillance.

Thanks for the tip about Telegram. It's really slick! And it has desktop clients too! Unofficial ones, but still… definitely an improvement from WhatsApp or Hangouts.