I never liked #Telegram in first place.

Shady homebrew crypto that once got broken, crowning themselves as "savior of #privacy" when nobody can verify the whole stack, and now this: #ads in chats.

https://telegram.dog/durov/142

Use #XMPP with proper #e2ee (like #OMEMO) or nothing at all. You can't have a realistic expectation of privacy otherwise.

Link by @thenewoil ne

Ads in chats? I didn't read it that way.

On the contrary, it seems Telegram has found a good balance to support development and server infrastructure for 500M users without turning into another Facebook.

XMPP is 100% free, but have you ever thought who's running the infrastructure? Can we really expect end-users to run their own servers? And if we had single-digit users per server, would s2s connections scale to 500M users? I highly doubt it.

thank you for the insight. I understand he had a tough choice to make.

On the other hand, though, on of the strengths behind a federation is that nobody needs to be the "backbone" of it. This is not to say that everyone easily can, will or even wants to self-host, but the possibility at least is there - in the code.

But of course, being free to choose is even more important than federating, so if you like Telegram, by all means keep using it - it's just that I won't.

@thenewoil

I quite like Telegram, yes, but I wish there was a way to scale federated networks for the masses. I don't think XMPP would work. Maybe Matrix, if they solve their current reliability issues.

Years before the Internet became available outside universities, I was running a #FidoNet node, a network of #BBS which allowed users to exchange mail and post to discussion groups.

We were volunteer-driven and funded by donations. More hierarchical and more bureaucratic than the #fediverse: we had elections for administrative roles, a long policy everyone had to agree to, voting for policy changes...

FidoNet reached 20k nodes at its apogee.

Nice! I can only imagine how it was doing that. If we can replicate that model in today's environment it would be great, but would require quite a lot of self organization I guess
@thenewoil

Today it's both easier and harder: no special telco equipment, cheap data, cheap & reliable computers.

But it's harder because user expectations are so damn high. You can't just give a free email account to make them happy. And then there's abuse. Lots of it. If you run a wiki or any publishing platform, it will be filled with spam. And so, running a free service today has become a tedious, thankless job today 😞

People want real-time, fido was batched. We had our share of idiots but using it required tech knowledge and high efforts. Now it's just buying a computer in a shop then start abusing services. Can't tell which is better in the long run though.
Hi from 2:370/15 😏

@kzimmermann@thenewoil