That doesn't seem as good as Wire. Why should I bother with Signal?

https://wire.com/

I think the better question is why should I bother with Wire? It's all of 3 months old, (and iOS is already on 2.0? Really?) Signal has been around for a few years now and uses a well-respected ratcheting encryption library similar to OTR. It's been well-audited and widely-adopted. It's already the de facto standard for FOSS E2E mobile messaging.

They seem more friendly and open than the Signal guys. They're using similar encryption, go check out their GitHub for more info. It doesn't require a phone number and has multi-device encryption with desktop support. It has audio, video, pictures, sketching, likes, editing, deleting, groups, and more. Signal feels like a joke in comparison. Try it.

Wire has launched in 2014 with emphasis on encrypted calls, it was only recently open sourced.

It also ticks many boxes, only it's not decentralised and the server ain't open source (yet).

Signal/TextSecure was released in 2014.

Can you be specific about the "many boxes" you're referring to? The most relevant to the grandparent being: has it ever been audited?

Wire is basically using the Signal protocol.

Signal has been reviewed by more people. Snowden recommends it.

Why don't people talk about https://wire.com/? It's encrypted and mostly open source. It has the most features I've seen including multiple devices, group chat, audio, desktop app.

Is it really a solution to the walled gardens people are stuck in now? The clients are open, so presumably it would be possible (and encouraged?) to write a custom client. That is definitely a big plus.

But it still looks like a centralized communication protocol that depends on proprietary servers and a private network to use. The issue with the walled gardens we're seeing (this week with this iconic photograph) is that there is no escape valve; no truly open alternative to the social network provided by these services.

With email we can (despite the difficulties) set up our own servers and clients, and communicate with anyone (again, assuming we manage to set up things correctly) who uses email today. We can even use encryption verified and trusted by many independent experts (i.e., OpenPGP). Despite all its warts, there is a safety valve there, and for now it maintains the balance between corporate and public interests.

With these chat services it seems that you are stuck with what their proprietors allow and assert.

Federation is hard to get right, but isn't it simply a base requirement for any truly free and open alternative to the WhatsApps and Snapchats of the world?

I understand that feeling, but it's too idealistic to be practical right now. We have to accept that convenience has won. These types of social networks depend on a critical mass of users. If the choice is to hold onto principles and lose, or compromise for now closer to the direction we want, then I think we should use Wire. It is the best chance we have for a service that could become popular enough, with people behind it who might embrace it being an open standard. There are no realistic alternatives in this mobile dominated walled-garden world. Most don't even have a desktop client, and require a phone number.

Even if we disregard its flaws, why would the masses migrate to Wire? Or Telegram, or Signal for that matter. I don't deny that it's a lot better than WhatsApp, but it still faces the same problem as any other alternative; the masses aren't using it.

The masses have expectations of free services, and there is no way to monetize privatized data (encrypted data) while providing the service for free. Peer to peer networks will suffer heavily from today's infrastructure due to the cost required to track and process millions of different certificates, as well as symmetric sessions.

There are some creative applications that could be useful, like the models used in East Asia through micro payments. However their culture is conducive to the micropayment model (I.e. emojis, etc) whereas the West is not. A micro payment service on privatized data would be ideal if it could be profitable, yet there is no profitable model to sustain it in the West.

Edit: also, no matter what micro payment model you use, if it is successful or trends, the established free non privatized services will exploit it and provide it for free.

I can see this possibly working doing in enclaves outside the US surveillance apparatus, but directly competing against it by taking on their grandfathered companies is extremely difficult.

Short answer: to encourage diversity.

Slightly longer answer now that I have time:

We don't need the masses to migrate now, it doesn't need to be either

- "everyone away from Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, everybody use only GPL and nothing for NSA, ФСБ etc to see"

or

- otherwise utter fail.

Getting people to try alternatives goes a long way. We have seen Microsoft changing massively over the last few years after Apple started eating away at the high end prosumer market for phones and laptops.

Facebook just caved after one head of a nation and a couple of newspapers, one of them in a tiny tiny country, stood up and said NO.

I, and many with me, also think the majority of the police force in most western countries is good hardworking people, (I'm personally in no position to judge eastern or African countries and even my opinion on western police is to be taken with a grain of salt) what we object to is just the warrantless dragnets etc.

And the reason why we are objecing them often isn't necessarily because we distrust our police, but as an insurance against future police and politicians, against future hackers who might get access to a raw dump, against unstable neighbouring countries and the occasional bad apple we see. Oh, and as a matter of solidarity to people like the Turkish who now seems to have reason for worry if they ever said or did anything that might have offended their (somewhat easily offended it seems) president:-|

(BTW: If you have spare time and/or cash consider supporting EFF. They seem to be very focused and reasonable to the point where they are taken seriously by politicians.)

Ah I see. Getting people used to a status quo where having multiple chat networks in use is normal is better than a monoculture in the long term. I can agree with that.

The real issue is the brass tacks. Who can afford to run their own private servers, or pay for data throughput for synching. Not to mention the enormous waste of energy and resources due to duplicated posts kept across millions of peer to peer networks. Convenience is King as usual, and places like Facebook have the motivation and ability to monetize and optimize.

The idea of private data atolls in the day of free services is a luxury and they are exploiting that facet. Cloud services like Gcloud, AWS, etc reflect this from their premium pricing.

What does the word "Materialistic" have to do with Hacker News? I did a web search to see if I'm missing something, but it looks like it's just a name that does not fit.

How about "Hacker News client by Trung", or "Trung HN" for short.

When I created it material design was a hot thing, so I just randomly came up with that name. Now it's not relevant anymore but I keep the name to avoid confusion for existing users.

You might consider updating the name to something like "Materialistic for Hacker News" so it's more clear and easy to find.

It's a nod to the Material design framework that was used for the project.

Just a heads up... Hacker News is not a free speech zone. The slightest negative emotion in a comment will have it either disappear or you banned. Even just writing a vulgar word is risky here. It is absolutely nothing like Usenet. This is the private forum of a Silicon Valley business. It leans more toward the new generation of mobile startup culture than what you're from.

I sympathize with you being rejected after commenting about how you feel rejected. It isn't very fair. The virtual space used to be a refuge for recluses who were ran out of regular society. Physical appearance or health did not factor in because nobody could see you.

But the Internet isn't that place anymore. Now it is dominated by the same competitions. To get favorable treatment here you need to be beautiful or wealthy. If your account was "pg" you could write this and anything else and it would be voted to the top.

Sorry. You have an ugly personality, and it requires special compassion for anyone to not reject that. Not everyone knows what it feels like to be rejected and how it can push you further into ugliness. I don't have any solutions for that, just wanted to let you know someone out there recognizes the pain.

> But the Internet isn't that place anymore. Now it is dominated by the same competitions. To get favorable treatment here you need to be beautiful or wealthy.

I disagree; The internet is not one big homogenous blob.

> You have an ugly personality, and it requires special compassion for anyone to not reject that

I do agree with your assessment, but it seems that unimportant is actively working towards being rejected. Instead of trying to improve himself, he's happily playing the role of the reject, blaming society and "harpies" or whatever on all his woes.

I'm sure there are people whose instinct is to find the goodness inside folks like him, and god bless 'em - but it ain't me. When someone flings shit at my feet, I don't dig through it to see if they swallowed a diamond.

> To get favorable treatment here you need to be beautiful or wealthy.

Or just well spoken and reasonable? Sure well known celebs of the tech industry do perhaps get the "favorable treatment" of extra upvotes. But people aren't participating in these discussions just to get "favorable treatment", they're doing it for the intellectually engaging environment, the quality of which is a result of trading off some amount of unmitigated free speech

And it's not like dissenting opinions get flagged or even downvoted to oblivion - the grandparent isn't gray, for example. Only noise, hate speech and misinformation gets that treatment. In fact I'd argue that grandparent maybe should be, since he's citing a universal hatred of women as a positive value in a community - so I think it's still a lot closer to Usenet than you claim.

It's not that simple--if you express negative emotion such as sadness and melancholy, it's easy to find support here. However if you use that negative emotion as a springboard for resentment, grudges, and generalized hate, as OP has, you won't find a good reception.

Why are you jealous when you can easily create your own website that does the same exact thing. You can think of your own added bonus and charge a different price.

Too often we feel like because someone else did something first, or theirs already became popular, that the opportunity is over. That denies the world your variation, which might turn out to be much better.

True words. I think many of us, me at least, have a special appreciation of the original and part of the fun is to think of something yourself. That does not mean, as you say, that we couldn't do the same thing, if not better/more for you.

Maybe I will give it a go ;)

It is not efficient to download Chromium for every app. I think Electron produces 60-80 MB binary files. I'm disappointed when someone uses Electron because it usually means a slow subpar experience.

A bird kills other birds in the nest, then leads humans to annihilate bee nests? This thing is pure evil.

And thus the understanding of humans.

This reminded me of Werner Herzogs talk on nature (in the jungle this time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA

"...there is a lot of misery, the same misery that is all around us.."

The humans are the ones annihilating bee nests. The bird is just opportunistic.

Perhaps you mean that humans are pure evil, given the other ways we treat animals and plants and other living things in this, our only home.

Thank you! Wire is the best, with multiple device support, clean mobile app, and a desktop client. It'd be nice if it were a standard open protocol so everyone could implement it, and find a way to allow federation. I'd pay to help support.

I think this is most useful for cross-compatibility. Right now if a client uses FreeBSD ZFS, and you need to mount it to access project files on your Linux desktop, you can't if they used encryption. But after this is standard, you should be able to mount the same ZFS filesystem anywhere.

Do you create zpools on memory sticks? Or how do you export the pool and move the device with the exported pool on it to your linux desktop?

Yes, you can use ZFS on memory sticks. You can also "zfs send | zfs recv" to copy a single projects dataset snapshot. You don't need to use actual disks though, if someone wants to send you project files you can have them either send you a file from "zfs send > snapshot.zfs", or send it over SSH, "ssh friend zfs send | zfs recv".

Encryption could be an issue if for example someone uses a FreeBSD based NAS for large data files, and you want to skip the network and just access them directly from your Linux box. You can "zfs export; zfs import", but not if they used encryption. That's where I think this will be useful, because then we have one standard filesystem we can use everywhere.

I am well aware of all of that. But all the zfs send/recv options can by their very definition not have the full disk encryption problem hinted at in the comment I replied to.

Also, if it is easier to take your NAS offline and apart to chuck the disks into your desktop (compared exporting it over the network), then your NAS is too small. What you were looking for is a Laptop.

Which leaves abusing the zpool on a memory stick as data interchange format. Most likely with copies=1, so you have to add some par2 files anyway, at which point you could simply put them on figuratively any other filesystem out there. And encrypt them with gpg/openssl etc. That way I would also not have to run a potentially maliciously crafted filesystem within my kernel.

Couldn't I call them myself and hold the phone up to a speaker playing the YouTube video? At least then after I annoy them they can hear me laugh as they hang up and sigh at how juvenile I am, and wonder why they're still my friend.