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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Messaging clients tend to be regional. WhatsApp is massive in Europe. From what I gather WeChat is dominant in mainland China but Hong Kong still used WhatsApp (though I think they might be coming round to Signal?) and the US, who have a higher ratio of Apple users vs the rest of the world, tend to use iMessage a lot more.

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Interoperability between these systems should be a public policy goal. I don't have to buy an AT&T phone anymore to call my friends; not sure why I have to buy iOS to chat with them.

I agree with you but this is a problem that date backs to the 90s (anyone remember Bitlbee, Trillion, Pidgeon, etc?). Unfortunately incompatibility is seen by businesses a feature rather than a flaw -- despite the annoyances it causes for users.

At one point the US Govt did mandate interoperability on AOL Messenger, once it became the dominant platform.

So there is precedent for this, but we live in very different times now.

What if we made a Internet Standard for messaging and presence?

>What if we made a Internet Standard for messaging and presence?

That's a wonderful idea. In fact, we've had such a standard since 1999 (protocol codified in 2004[0])

It's called XMPP[1]

[0] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3920.txt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP

Not only that, but a lot of closed messaging platforms were originally built on XMPP.

There's been a few open standards. The problem isn't that standards exist, it's that walled gardens are generally more profitable.

In fact Google Talk, Facebook Messenger and Skype were all either based upon, or supported XMPP...and now don't. Slack used to support IRC and not doesn't. There's a term often credited to Microsoft that also applies here: embrace, extend, extinguish.

SMS, MMS, and RCS are examples of such standards, although only SMS/MMS have full support on both iphone and android.

I don't mind the interoperability. Take email for example. Even if you avoid Gmail/Google, so many people do, so Googs eventually gets your email anyway. So we chat, even if you don't use FB, if someone you chat with does, they still get that conversation. So the interoperability provides a buffer or insulator between you and the company you are wanting to avoid.

Then again, I've kinda given up on email privacy since at least half of my emails go to Google's servers anyway. I'm not sure if we can avoid Facebook having my IP address (or whatever future attack vectors are found after the protocol has been standardised) if I message WhatsApp users from my Signal account.

Interoperability is tricky when one set of apps has end to end encryption as a requirement, and the other set has absence of end to end encryption as a requirement.

> WhatsApp is massive in Europe.

You're completely right that messaging clients is regional, but it's even more regional than just "Europe". I'm always confused when people claim that WhatsApp is huge in Europe, because I know literally only two people who use it. They only use WhatsApp because they have friends outside Europe.

I think we need to think in terms of single countries when talking messaging apps. Again take WhatsApp. Pretty big in Germany and Spain, but almost non-existing in Denmark (who instead rely more on Facebook Messenger or iMessage).

It's nr 1 in Germany UK Spain Italy Portugal Switzerland Austria Belgium Netherlands Norway Greece. That's like 90% of Europe.

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