[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Michael Vetter]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 17:26:11 +0200
Dominik George <nik at naturalnet.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> >You can. I can. Daniel Pocock can. That's 3 of us.
> >
> >Now ask yourself - who are we making this software for? For us 3?
> >Or for the masses out there, hoping that maybe they will see value
> >in using free/open source?
> >
> >Without users, any project is effectively dead. So yes, I will
> >struggle even for the sake of having few more users.  
> 
> maybe stop thinking about Telepathy as a stand-alone tool. I think we
> should see free communication as a whole. Telepathy should be part of
> that and bring ideals forward by being a good frontend.
> 
> There is no benefit for anyone in pulling users of other messengers
> over to telepathy:
> 
>  - Users will be using a product that will always be worse than the
> original, because supporting all of the proprietary stuff is close to
> impossible and undocumented things will keep changing. Things will
> keep breaking. For Skype, it's even worse. There is no way for
> supporting Skype except RPCing the original client - why should
> someone install original Skype, then go and use Telepathy as a
> frontend? None of this makes any sense, and Telepathy will take
> damage because people believe it supports something, then find out
> it's crap. *People leaving after a bad experience is much worse than
> people not coming in the first place!*

Totally agreed. For that reason I would rather invest some time into
making XMPP work better with Telepathy. Supporting more XEPs.
I am quite new to this mailing list but recently tried to get my feet
wet:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2016-April/006805.html
 
> - Developers will have to support stuff they cannot support because
> there is nothing to rely on. Users will be complaining, and devs will
> answer „I don't know, something broke in $protocol“ - users will take
> that as finger-pointing and lose trust in Telepathy and free software
> in general.
> 
> This is not only true for Telepathy. It is true for all projects that
> strive to be a painless drop-in replacement for everyone. Look at
> Ubuntu - started out as a user-friendly Linux Desktop for Windows
> users, now it is an unusable software museum and harder to get
> running than any recent Debian release.
> 
> I see no point in running for market share - if you pay close
> attention to this discussion, it becomes obvious that the only gain
> for Telepathy would be market share among chat clients. That somehow
> contradicts the ideals of an open community. Why do you bother if
> Pidgin has twice as many users? Who actually cares?
> 
> And it is that kind of competitive thinking that keeps free
> communication and a free network trapped in stone age - if all of us
> got together and get free-rtc backends, frontends *and* marketing up
> and running instead of arguing about how to increase client market
> share, there would indeed be a realistic chance of getting people to
> use it.
> 
> Let's get the message out, bring more clients into good shape for
> modern XMPP, find a sponsor and advertise it just as TPTB do.
> 
> Sounds like some childish dream that won't work out? Sure, I pitty
> you if a dream is not a good starting point for you anymore. If you
> don't try, but wave a white flag in front of Facebook Inc. by
> supporting their stuff as a last resort to gain market share, *then*
> you will soon be lost in irrelevance.

Well said.