[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Niels Ole Salscheider]

Am Montag, 25. April 2016, 20:59:28 CEST schrieb Martin Klapetek:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Dominik George <nik at naturalnet.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > >The technical details are largely irrelevant. What matters is that,
> > >the way things stand today, a GNOME user can't use Whatsapp with
> > >Telepathy, and nobody is doing the work to change that.
> > 
> > Which is a good thing.
> > 
> > Make people want to use free software and services, rather than spoiling
> > free software with crap.
> 
> 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.
> 
> If significant portion of people are using WhatsApp or WhatEver,
> not supporting it only means being obliterated into irrelevance
> 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?).

Well, I think I was close to 10% at some point when it comes to XMPP. Yes, it 
takes some time to convince your friends to give it a try, but that's not the 
real problem.
The real problem is to make people stay. And that's somewhat difficult with the 
current state of XMPP clients since there is way too much that does not work 
reliable: File transfers fail because of NAT, audio and video chat does not 
work reliable, messages get lost because people insist on using IM on their 
phones and nobody implements stream management.
Then you start to explain why one needs OTR on top of XMPP and that comes with 
its own problems (e. g. when you are online with several devices, when you 
send encrypted offline messages and so on). And then you have to admit that your 
file transfers and audio/video chats are completely unencrypted and that they 
should not be used for sensible information.

This really leaves the impression that XMPP does not work well (of course its 
only the fault of the implementations but noone will care if you tell them).
I think the situation would be much better if there was one good client for at 
least Linux (because that's what I care about ;-) ), Windows and Android that 
fixes all these issues. The XEPs are there (apart from encryption but one could 
at least implement OMEMO for text and SRTP for everything else) but 
implementing them is of course much work.

> That's just a reality.
> 
> Cheers