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What are some downsides of software being federated? (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 5 points 3 years ago (11 children)

If you subscribe to the old Unix mantra of "one tool, one purpouse", then yes.

If you prefer convenience and the ability to accomplish things, then no.

Using eMail for video chat isn't really an option.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Hope would email for video chat work?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Have a look at basically any other text-only messenging service/app. Slack, Signal, Threema, WhatsApp and dozens of other similar services started out as text-only and added voice/video chat afterward. None of their protocols were originally designed vor video chat and none of them supported it initially.

    There's even an IRC extension that allows video chat over IRC.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Using eMail for video chat isn’t really an option.

    Lol. That's not how anything works. You also cannot use a hammer to replace the SSD in your computer. Sometimes you need to pick up a screwdriver instead.

    What you want is the 'everything app'. Go ahead and talk to Elon Musk. See how that is progressing πŸ™ƒ

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    You can't use You can't use Slack for Video Calls? Or Teams? Or Signal? Or Threema? Or WhatsApp? Or Facebook Messenger? Or almost any other 1:1 chat app/protocol that survived long enough?

    All of my examples were originally text-only messengers meant for sending text messages, pretty similar to email.

    And even email didn't stay completely "pure", as, over time, it evolved file attachments.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Those are all apps that implement multiple different protocols to do chat/audio/video. Also none of those are federated to my knowledge, you can't chat as a teams user with someone on whatsapp. Lemmy and kbin can talk to each other, just like outlook and Gmail and Hotmail can.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Yes, now please check the title and content of the OP.

    The whole discussion is about the downsides of federated protocols/apps/systems vs non-fedreated ones.

    And my point was that it's much easier to expand non-federated software.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not sure you can make that argument. It's more about having a dedicated developer base than federation. FOSS has almost always been behind corporate development, that's not really a downside of federation itself.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    The whole system behind eMail (all the protocols involved and all the software implementing it) has been built by FOSS and non-FOSS, commercial and non-commercial entities.

    Over the decades there were enormous amounts of money and enthusiast labour on it.

    And still it's really hard to make sure that the address in the "From:" field is actually the one that sent the email. And if you try to do something trivial like sending an encrypted message to a random email user, chances are almost zero that that user is actually able to read the encrypted email, because it requires additional configuration.

    There were >40 years of time, millions of man hours and billions of dollars have been invested in the eMail system, and yet trivial things that pretty much every major messaging service has are still outlandish for eMail.

    And not even Gmail, with all their money, managed to fix these issues.

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