[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Martin Klapetek]

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

> Hi,
> [...snip..]
> 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?
>

*You* should care. If you don't have users, you won't get new
contributors while old ones will slowly leave too and the project
just dies. Simple as that.

Just look at KDE Telepathy, probably one of the biggest Telepathy
clients out there. We've had about 10 everyday developers 5 years ago,
we have two in a _month_ now. And we do have quite an awesome
feature set, yet our users are also declining. Why? Because we don't
support $protocol (and also because mobile).


> 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.
>

Sure, please go ahead. Google couldn't pull it off with their seemingly
infinite resources and Google had working audio/video calls and much more.
I realistically don't expect others to succeed. But I'm happy to be proven
wrong
and support your cause.


> 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.
>

But then that's not really the point of Telepathy, to be
yet-another-of-million
XMPP clients, is it? Telepathy then just becomes an unnecessary middle-layer
burden for you.


> 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.
>

Yes, sadly my starting point everyday is now a dying KDE IM project and
thinking
on how can I save it. I have tried and still trying, in fact. It's not like
I'm just
making stuff up, you know. I actually do talk to and listen to users and to
what
they want. But you don't have to take it from me; let's meet here in 2 years
time and reasses the situation, time will tell.

Cheers
-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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