Money. It's not profitable to run an encrypted messaging service for free, because you can't extract any data from the chats, and people aren't willing to pay what it costs to maintain a good app.
Then can we (the people) donate our time to make an end to end encrypted, decentralized, peer to peer, optionally anonymous (through Tor or whatever if necessary), native chat client for all relevant platforms?
It takes a few maintainers per platform and a few people willing to lead the effort, but I think we could get enough people on Hacker News to help out.
(I've actually been debating making an "Ask HN: Would you join this effort?" post but have been putting it off for one reason or another.)
"We, the people" is such a fragile concept when it comes to resource stability (time, money, dedication). Looking at a project like Linux, there are commercial interests that fund a large part of the pipeline.
Running the actual network and developing the various messenger clients add a layer of organizational complexity that, in my perspective, only private companies have been able to honor, and only to the extent described by the OP.
One could settle for less Service, but then we have XMPP with various encryption schemes. Too complex to set up.
The ideal would require no servers, because the chat would be fully peer to peer. People wanting to be anonymous could just connect through Tor. (Each user account is just a private key, etc, etc.)
Of course, in reality everything is behind a NAT and/or firewall. It wouldn't be too difficult to have "dumb" servers that just exist to pass messages hosted by the community though.
Maybe a company could allow paying customers to invite 10 of their contacts to use the app/service for free. Or is even the potential association of all of those people too insecure?
I otherwise can't imagine how to bootstrap a network.
I otherwise can't imagine how to bootstrap a network.
Facebook started with a narrow target: students of some uni. Look for another similar group of persons, that want privacy and don't mind spending a few dollars.
Edit: Whatsapp (everybody here in Spain has it) was a paid app at first. They gave one year away... eventually they made it free, around the time that Facebook bought it.
One problem with bootstrapping a network of users of an encrypted messaging app/service is that info about the network of users itself arguably needs to be secured too.
But you're still probably right overall. Marketing to businesses or teams within businesses is probably the best bet.
Yeah, wondering how WhatsApp would be doing if Facebook wouldn't have bought them. It might have been much better for the market if they would still be independent.
Yeah, even requiring users to _send_ messages probably isn't enough to prevent spam. But that's assuming something like the example I imagined, someone wanting to received encrypted messages from anonymous others.
If a user's address is private tho, then asking them to pay to receive messages should be as sensible as the degree to which they protect the distribution of their address.
Unlimited texting as the norm is pretty new, carriers have charged for incoming and outgoing MMS since it became a thing. Same with minutes and received calls.
Getting charged to receive a message I didn't ask for was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. The difference is that people are even less likely to tolerate it now.
Donate to Open Whisper Systems (maintainer of Signal and led by the designer of the encryption protocol therein). It recently became a 501c nonprofit organization following a hefty donation, but one day that will dry up and they will need continued support.
We have so many decades of improvements in programming methodologies and sophistication, yet independent developers still cannot produce viable software which is alternative to the for-profit model?
