The reason why we as consumers get held to ransom by Big Tech is because they are the one’s who create walled gardens of their apps to ensure it is very difficult to leave their service and to maintain any communication with your friends or family who stay behind. They count on that sticky network effect to hold you in place.
The world was not always like this, as we see with e-mail where any app can e-mail any other app. Neither was messaging as it was also once open.
So what we need is a protocol to be broadly supported that will connect anyone to any other app supporting that open protocol, but which allows end-to-end encryption. We need apps to support it, just like Hubzilla which built in a number of plugins to allow it to communicate with Diaspora, XMPP, Fediverse, etc all from one place.
What do we do about Big Tech like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft? Well either they must be mandated by law to build in this protocol support, or we as consumers must start voting with our choices and not make use of services that are walled gardens. Our future lies in an open interoperable Internet offering privacy. The future cannot be walled gardens separating us all.
From the link below the key columns are the License (how open is it for anyone to use without cost?) and End-To-End Encryption (can I use it privately?). From these requirements we can see that the following protocols could be suitable to consider:
- Bitmessage (Desktop P2)
- Briar (P2) but Android only
- Echo
- Jami (Desktop and Mobile P2P)
- Matrix (Desktop and Mobile Federated Client-Server)
- Ricochet (Desktop P2P)
- Signal (Centralised Desktop and Mobile)
- SIMPLE (more phones with SIP?)
- Tox (Desktop and Mobile P2P)
- XMPP (Desktop and Mobile Decentralized Client-Server)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_protocols
#technology #instantmessengers #interoprability #bigtech #privacy
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Yes the thing is the app is Delta Chat and the protocol is e-mail with OpenPGP. So you are actually proposing that e-mail and OpenPGP be used as the standard protocol for instant messaging. The idea with the open protocol is that any app can be develoepd to support it and will be compatible. Challenge we run into with e-mail is that if instant chat is supposed to include presence indications, voice/video, etc in realtime it going to fall short. E-mail has a much lower priority for QoS when it comes to networking and comms so I’m not sure I can see it being adopted for instant messaging across all platforms. The concept is very good though based on an open protocol and standards, but it’s not the protocol taht was designed or optimised for instant messaging. I think that is why e-mail was not listed with those othe protocols.
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Yes they can work together, but WebRTC is mainly used in Jitsi and others for streaming video and audio. I think the shortcoming may be lack of presence, or chatrooms or something in the protocol?