[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Dominik George]

Hi,

>It's not a good thing.
>
>Free software and services unfortunately are not in a position
>to dictate trends to the world, as sad as it may be.

Then change that.

>If significant portion of people are using WhatsApp or WhatEver,
>not supporting it only means being obliterated into irrelevance

I still think this is wrong.

Concerning WhatsApp: Supporting it would mean to provide a *new* reason for people to use it. WhatsApp is mobile-only, there isn't even an official desktop client (there is a web app that interfaces with the phone, but that is not a full client and it works fine in any browser on any OS). So creating a client with WhatsApp support would create something that didn't exist before, not even as non-free software. So doing so would mean nothing but free advertising for a crap service.

For any other service, it's basically the same, however, I do not know whether e.g. Telegram has an official desktop client.

Another thing to keep in mind: Any third-party implementation of any proprietary protocol will break. We have had MSN protocol implementations, and we saw them break. We have had Google Talk implementations, and we saw them break. We have had Facebook chat implementations, and we saw them break. Making people use proprietary services with Telepathy (orr any other app) will make them rely on it, having it break will break users' trust in the app - not in the service.

With all that in mind, I am convinced that supporting a ton of hypes will not do anyone any good, and it will in the long term damage Telepathy and free software as a whole.

>because nobody is going to use something, network or client, where
>they will be all alone, no matter how much better it may really be.
>And there is no way you could convince even 10% of your friends
>to switch to any current free software and service (diaspora, anyone?).

YMMV, but I actually got the better of my contacts moved to XMPP (a bit less than a hundred people). I managed to do so because the people over at Conversations got their butts down and built a really decent client, also creating XMPP protocol updates underway, and it can now keep up with WhatsApp in every point.

The next step is to not let Conversations grow old alone but learn from them and make Telepathy something that provides another proof that XMPP and clients are great!

-nik
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