Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech companies may be forced into finding a solution that allows users to connect across the various messaging platforms. Currently, each service has its own way of handling communication that is not compatible with others, placing a burden upon the user when there is a need to reach someone using a different platform or service.
A universal communication method would benefit the end-user, whether using an iPhone or Android phone, with Facebook, iMessage, or other social media apps. A cross-platform solution works against the existing model that social media and tech companies have accepted as standard, keeping their customers or users circling back to the same company rather than moving between different services. It’s the same reason for members’ rewards cards at grocery stores and punch cards for a free sandwich at the deli. Keeping the existing customer is much easier than recruiting a new one.
This is such an obvious and popular requirement, I’m baffled it’s taking governments around the world this long to get to implementing it. So much of our communication infrastructure is owned by 3-4 giant technology companies, all incompatible with each other, with absolutely zero control over what happens to your messages and your data. Forcing them to be interoperable – preferably via forcing the publication of open APIs third party developers can tap into – is not only the bare minimum we should expect from our online communication channels, it’s probably also a highly popular requirement that would simplify the the lives of people all across the European Union, where different countries favour different messaging protocols.
How could anybody without a financial stake in Apple, Google, or Facebook be against this?
Of course, the very, very sour note here is that at the same time, the European Commission is also toying with the idea of weakening or outright eliminating end-to-end encryption in messaging applications, so it might well turn out to be all for naught.
Millennials and Gen-Z don’t care if they have to ‘move between platforms’. We talk on 10 services at the same time, and ditch them just as easily. It’s neither a nuisance or an inconvenience. We don’t even notice it. Government intervention is not wanted here. Governments generally want weak encryption, back doors and ways of tracking their citizens.
I also DO NOT want open APIs on iMessage. I get enough spam on Facebook, hacked accounts messaging me on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat weekly — we don’t need to weaken iMessage in any way.
It’s fascinating to hear your perspective, but can you be sure you won’t like something you’ve never experienced? I’m not a millennial, but I’ve used computers since my earliest memories, and I’ve never known a time when messaging platform interoperability wasn’t an issue. The benefits are far greater than just avoiding having to move between platforms. It means entirely new services can be introduced in wholly new areas that Apple, Google or Facebook haven’t even thought about or aren’t interested in. It opens up the space for business models that don’t rely on advertising or closed ecosystems. And it might reduce the digital divide, which raises the tide for everyone.
It’s possible none of these benefits will come to pass, but it would at least be nice to try it. At a technical level I see no reason why this needs to get tied up with weakening encryption.
But I certainly agree that interoperability doesn’t seem to drive consumer demand.
You are worried against government spying and have no problem with installing 10 different messaging apps? This just doesn’t add up.
How about having an opensource implementation you can actually trust?
How about not being tied to a rubbish platform only because it comes with all 10 apps you need for basic communication?
> How about having an opensource implementation you can actually trust?
Matrix would fit into this just fine.
I agree with you. Things move so fast and the users don’t care.
I’m on the tail end of Gen X and I feel the same. I get the argument for open APIs. There are open APIs for messaging & they haven’t caught on for the big guys. It would take govt intervention to force it. And given politics in countries around the world today, I’m still amazed so many want govt involved. Australia’s mandates. Austria’s lockdowns. Italy’s lockdowns. Biden’s mandates. Solomon Islands anyone? On and on.
NO! THANK! YOU!
P.S. – not to mention the myriad of things meant to unify. Java – write once, run anywhere. Qt – any platform. Companies compete, so these ideas will be met with competition trying to gain control.
A standardized messaging API isn’t automagically a spying free-for-all and it isn’t going to make privacy/encryption-oriented alternatives vanish for those who take privacy seriously enough to pro-actively try to protect it, which happen to be just a tiny sliver of the population. Most people seem to consider weak/little/no privacy as the cost of admission or fair trade for services/products/prices rendered. Your willingness to `so easily` adopt/dump services tells me you’re okay with weak encryption, backdoors, and tracking since you gladly use services guilty of those things. You say you don’t want weakened messaging, but then have no problem using weak messaging. It’s funny to me when people share their lives publicly on social media and complain about privacy.
This can be useful also for blockchain technology. A use case is that when two people are communicating and under such circumstance the two people have reached an agreement and digitally signed a document, they can store this agreement in the blockchain, In this way, they can remove third party witnessing such agreements to take place.
Open standards. We know how to do it. The OpengL ARB model is as good as any. Telecoms regulation and other regulation related to the industry is nothing new either.
EU policy tends to favour social policy mechanisms and levelling up growth. Myself I feel this is where the main strengths of the EU are. Technology is tertiary or a means to an end in this respect. Education and policing and responsible media regulation have a bigger impact on national security than encryption being available by default to the masses.
As for social media it’s a cesspit. The sooner that bubble bursts the better.
So….
Back to XMPP?
Just imagine of google had stuck with xmpp for google talk.
They could have been at the front of implementing a universal standard instead they delivered 5+ different messaging apps
They just need to dust off the cobwebs and it’s there waiting
Then I have bad news for you – schools in the UK already mandate the use of proprietary cloud based platforms for pretty much everything. When I asked the principal about privacy and security of pupils’ data he was not at all concerned because they are protected by a contract and a privacy policy.
So much for teaching children about responsible use of technology.
Most schools don’t even teach basic use of technology, let along responsible use of it. It’s a fucking joke.
Remember the days when we used Pidgin? That was a while ago, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Gmail chat & so on… The only one that didn’t work out well was Skype…
I remember Pidgin quite fondly. Of course MSN messenger and ICQ. That’s part of why I love following SerenityOS, the classic looking UI similar to what i used with ICQ and MSN Messenger back in the day
Trillian on Windows. Greatest chat app ever.
@caraibes
What I found hilarious, many moons ago when I was applying for jobs, since they were remote interviews, I was asked to use skype. I couldn’t get it working on my Android phone at all, using the official Skype app at the time. This was in 2014. What I ended up having to do was boot up my Nokia N9 or N900 (I can’t recall now which) and use it’s multi-protocol app that was built into the phone. Worked perfectly for Skype. I’m still irritated that Maemo/MeeGo was killed off, it was a much better OS than Android ever has been. Even Blackberry 10 OS also had a multi-protocol app. So you never had to install 10 different apps just to talk to all your various friends, you just added the account into the main messaging app, and you could talk to everyone.
This is something we lose with iOS and Android.
Most internet communication used to use protocols that were described in RFC’s.
There exists one even for IRC (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2812), an early distributed messaging protocol.
Once commerce took over in the 90’s, competition replaced collaboration, and everything fragmented. I hope we can partially revert this bad development.
I miss IRC, forums, RSS and visiting sites to read articles and commenting.
I could use IRC today so it’s my own fault for missing it
In some ways things fragmented, while in other ways got consolidated into the social platforms.
A Facebook page just doesn’t convey the same feeling like the look and feel of a niche website did in pre 2013.
An Facebook group is not as useful as a classic forum.
Most websites also look pretty bad today. No character in their design and the content is floating somewhere along with all sorts op pop-ups.
It’s a sad state, in my opinion.
The content itself is worse as well. Now it’s badly written SEO fodder.
Searching for a “Tutorial” is a good example. Most good tutorials (taking WordPress as example), cut off around 2012. Where they were advanced, detailed and sometimes in parts.
Today it’s mostly “Best calendar plugins in YEAR” and “Top 10 gallery plugins” etc.
/rant
Everything you say you miss is still available to you so you’ve willingly chosen to abandon them. Maybe the reason you don’t find the same number of tutorials now as 10+ years ago is simply because things have evolved. The struggles that warranted those “advanced, detailed” tutorials have been eliminated or greatly reduced to the point the need for them evaporated. Technology has gotten easier to use, not harder. I think your nostalgia for the past is skewing your interpretation of the present. I have fond memories of previous eras too and no shortage of things I hate today, but if I’m being honest then there’s no way I can say we were better off then.
@victorjonsson
The old school platforms had their merits before being completely drowned out by social media. Most people basically hear of social media a dozen to a hundred times more than other things like forums and blogs if they even know they exist.
Experts were certainly more accessible back in the day and experts had more prominence in mainstream media and helped shape and inform public policy discussion.
As you note so much now is clickbait and SEO driven, or even just self marketing…
I seriously only started using Facebook recently because for some reason people have started many unorganized groups there for the stuff I used to go to forums for. Whether they got chased off the forums for being trolls and now have a ‘safe space’ to troll on FB, I don’t know, but if I am not in certain groups for old computer crap, then I miss out on releases of new games and such, that usually have a small window of when I can order them. Really wish people would go back to using forums for such things, they seem to be much better suited to discussions than FB is.
@leech
Blue’s News is still alive if you want release news. It still has a forum too.
leech,
This, in essence, is the network effect. The people you want to talk to are only available on the dominant social platforms even if you don’t want to be on them. Without federated networks, people who vote with their feet against dominant corporations can end up being isolated đ
As clickbait, this article is doing its job. The question of flatpak has been long settled. The future has been and continues to be atomic Linux distributions with flatpak used for desktop applications. That fact that you have always liked to do things the old way has no bearing. It is the desire of Fedora, Debian, KDE, and several other stakeholders that the matter be considered settled. Even Arch-based distributions are beginning to embrace flatpak via the Bauh package manager. The future for linux is very bright. That future is Flatpak.
Clickbait the wrong article?
Speaking of clinging to the old ways⊠er, articlesâŠ
We already have a cross-platform messaging standard: the SMS and its extension MMS. Nobody wants to use them.
I find this idea very stupid and ridiculous. I don’t care if websites converge and unify their messaging subsystems. Actually I do think that it’s impossible. Actually I do think that it’s harmful. It would allow all the participating vendors to spy on us and collect our messages. And yes, it would make encryption pretty much meaningless. What’s the point to encrypt when “everyone” can read your messages anyway?
sj87,
Many people do use them, but the networks aren’t exactly open to non-carriers and that limits innovation and applications.
I won’t question your opinion, but why do you say it would allow all the participating vendors to spy on us and collect our messages? Assuming it’s done right, the only vendors who would be able to spy on a conversation are the sender’s provider and the recipient’s provider. Furthermore if P2P encryption is used then even the providers themselves would only see the encrypted traffic.
Take SMTP for example… it is a horrific mess of legacy standards on top of standards and is in desperate need of a fresh slate…but the fact that russian providers and chinese providers can participate on the same federated network does not imply they can read all our email messages. Cryptography does work and there’s no reason to think it becomes meaningless in federated network. I’d say the opposite is true, cryptography plays a very important role in protecting privacy across federated networks.
I think there’s tons of merit for standardized messaging between competing providers, but the network effects are so strong that practically the whole market became consolidated to the top. It’s probably not realistic to change things now, but I think we could have build stronger federated messaging standards in the early days of the internet before corporations became too powerful.
SMS/MMS is not so widely used because carriers charge (sometimes a lot) for it…
SMTP on the other hand is widely used, and anyone can set up their own mail server and interoperate.
Having an open standard doesn’t mean anyone can read your messages, there are still ways that encryption can be used over the top of an open standard – eg S/MIME and PGP exist for email.
How would an open standard make it any easier for vendors to spy?
Messages would be routed directly, so only the service provider of sender and recipient could potentially read messages – not anyone else.
You would have lots of vendors to choose from, or could operate your own server. Choose one you trust, or run your own.
There is no reason you can’t use an over the top encryption protocol, so the underlying transport provider only sees ciphertext.
It’s neither impossible nor harmful. See SMTP and PGP or S/MIME etc. It would be better than the status quo in pretty much every way.
Please make this happen. In some social circles in the US, you can’t participate unless you have iMessage. Do a search for “iphone green bubbles” if you don’t believe me. Keep in mind this also happens at work social circles (which you can’t choose).
I dread something like this happening to European countries too.
In psychological research, I would add that, by the way, many directions are now available, and the idea that you still have psychological problems is absurd. And a regular person who is unable of resolving his own issues. Fortunately, I learned about therapists https://www.linkedin.com/company/calmerry , which is an excellent approach to deal with problems without having to leave the house. Furthermore, the consultation website is still operational, and I am pleased to use it when the time available for traditional appointments is very limited
Iâm late. Arenât I always?
As gen X Iâll say I remember the reply to the first response.
Iâll also say this isnât 1995.
As a side note, iMessage/AppleMessenger works to any cell phone or ip terminal.
Cross compatibility appears to be a gen x idea. Gen z doesnât care. And honestly, not being part of the whole social media scene: I donât want cross compatibility.
I get enough spam as it is from actual cell phones.
Last thing I need is messages from other services finding their way to my phone!
Unless it is 100% opt IN, bad idea. Youâre not looking at AIM calling MSN here. Youâre opening the gates to a billion new ânumbersâ accessing people who donât want to be accessed!