No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life.
Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head:
- spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone
- infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols
- maintainers get poached by mega corps
- hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions
- a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting)
- VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users
I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
I agree. That’s an interesting model for chat. But remember, modern email is quite complex when you add all the standards for authenticity and security together, as well as informal requirements like spam filtering. But even if self-hosting were a pain, it’d still be an improvement over today’s fragmentation-by-app status quo.
Right. Instant messaging should be considered basic / core utility like ISPs. I can pay a cheap or even a free one and they'll probably sell my data or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy
Seem to remember paying for WhatsApp when I first downloaded it. I’d be happy to keep paying. Just not the amount that they can make from advertising. Solution maybe to ban intrusive advertising so they can’t make a lot of money from it that way?
I would be happy to pay few bucks a month for an instant messaging service to make sure it's independent. I consider it basic necessity like internet on my phone.
The problem is the fragmentation. We need federation first across all providers and then everyone could choose whatever provider they want to pay for
Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else.
No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made.
The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.
I paid for WhatsApp, USD 1 for year for a few years. They dropped the fee back in 2016.
If WhatsApp wasn't part of Meta they would have found a way, even more it was a very small team before the acquisition already supporting hundreds of MAU, promises were made there wouldn't ever be ads but of course that corporate-consolidation doesn't care about any of that.
You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users.
You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
In most of the world SMS ("texting") was (or still is) a paid service per message (~5/10/20 cents per message or so, I can't remember exactly and would have to factor in inflation). But it was costly enough that people flocked to WhatsApp to avoid texting costs. Paying 1 USD or 1 EUR per year was a great deal to send unlimited texts.
> You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
Did you know people below the poverty line would by $20 S40 feature phones just to be able to run WhatsApp? The other 2G phones cost less than half that amount, but you had to pay $0.1-$0.2 per SMS sent, in that light, spending $1 per year for WhatsApp's unlimited messages on a PAYG data package was a steal.
So no, I am not nuts, you just didn't think through the value proposition.
Network effects, similar to present-day Facetime in the US. There's Zoom and Google Meet, but if your family and friends are already FaceTiming, you're pressured into buying a iDevice.
There's a surprisingly number of people whose usage of the Internet is exclusively through WhatsApp, and may not even know what a "browser" is or how to use it to get in touch with their contacts.
Nonsense, it was very popular in my low-income country even back then. They charged something like half a day of income of a manual laborer per year, and everybody was happy to pay since it made your life so much easier. Of course, there's no going back now that everybody is accustomed to using it "for free".
If you read other top-level comments, you'll find that many people are simply allergic to paying for software. A lot of people don't have cards or even bank accounts so it's just not possible.
It replaced SMS, which was costly, so the deal was pretty clear. Back in those days people were quite aware of SMS prices and 1 EUR/year to replace SMS was a no brainer. It was very popular despite the price. For many people, it was the only app they actually bought.
Sure. Which would easilly pay the actual operating costs of a messaging platform
However that’s in a world where you don’t pay people tens of billions of dollars for building a relatively simple messaging platform who manage to get the network lock-in.
