Messenger X won't fix anything
I’ve been annoyed by the state of smartphones lately, and one of the top
contenders in “Most Annoying” is instant messaging. Currently, the options for
instant messaging outside of communities like tech (IRC), gaming (Discord, which
has a bunch of other problems), etc. is an app.
At the top of this list have been WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Telegram, to
name a few. What similarities do all of them have? Requiring a phone number to
sign up.
It’s not just about the phone number though: In Europe, you’re almost forced to
use WhatsApp to be part of a social circle. It doesn’t matter if it’s just
talking to someone quickly over a text, organising meetups or catching up with
an old friend: it’s all done over WhatsApp. I’m sure this applies to other
regions as well, just replace WhatsApp with iMessage, for example.
The situation has gotten a bit better with the recent adoption of Signal, but
even though Signal is viewed as the saviour to the mentioned services (and it is
substantially better due to it being open-source and implementing an open
standard, for example), it really isn’t, because it doesn’t fix the fundamental
mistakes that instant messengers have had in the past years: It requires you to
have a phone (and a phone number) to use it.
Requiring a phone (number) to use a messaging service is… weird. It heavily
ties the act of instant messaging to a phone – and simultaneously excludes
people that don’t have smartphones from the massive amount of social
interactions these messengers see.
But, it doesn’t stop there. Other problems include Signal being centralized and
not allowing other implementations than the official clients. You’re not allowed
to spin up your own server for decentralized communication but you are being
tied to the official Signal servers, making these a single point of failure. In
addition, the fact that 3rd party clients are not allowed means you’re forced to
accept the decisions that the developers of Signal make; may it be that you
can’t set a custom status message or cryptocurrency being baked into the
clients. You have no control over this and you have to eat bad decisions up,
just like you have with the other messengers.
How do we solve this issue, though? What’s the correct way to ensure that the
next instant messaging client doesn’t suffer the same downsides?
Contrary to what a lot might believe, it’s not another app. Instead, it requires
a proper protocol to be defined, which supports at least the following features:
- Not tied to a phone and/or a phone number
- Minimal but feature rich enough to see wide adoption
- Decentralized servers (possibly Peer-To-Peer)
- End-to-end encryption
- Allows 3rd party clients
These should be the most important ones, for the following reasons.
To support these features means being unable to be censored, keeping the user be
the focus of the app (in contrast to a company), allowing a rich ecosystem of
implementations with different look and feel (as well as system requirements),
and not requiring users to own specific hardware to interact with other people.
To my knowledge, Matrix has been the latest (popular) attempt at this, but it’s
falling short of a few things. As someone that doesn’t use the protocol enough,
encryption just seems too complicated when it should be transparent and the user
shouldn’t have to think about it. In addition, the only viable client I’ve seen
is Element, a client heavily based on JavaScript and specifically Electron for a
desktop app, which makes the client feel sluggish, especially on older hardware.
Adding to this, the only server implementation I’ve seen is written in Python
and, supposedly, is very taxing to run, especially on small servers.
Matrix, so far, has been a good try, but it has fallen a bit short on some things. But, I could be wrong, and I’m open to being told better!
The state of instant messaging is not a great one and can be greatly improved upon, but it’s a big undertaking that needs multiple people to work on. And even then, adoption is not guaranteed. It’s by no means a trivial task and takes a lot of work to do, but the outcome is one that’s undoubtedly wonderful for everyone involved, creators of any kind as well as end users.
Personally, I’d love to be part of a team of people working on a better instant messaging experience, both in the technical and user sense, so if you do, please don’t hesitate to contact me.