Gregory's ServerOur voice phone systems are seamlessly federated. You can call people across carriers, over national boundaries, instantaneously, and the only friction is slightly more numbers to dial.
 31 comments
So here's my question: why the hell do we mess around with so many proprietary OTT services? Why do you have some friends who WhatsApp, others who Telegram, others who Signal? Why do we have to figure out whether to Zoom or Meet or FaceTime or Jitsi? We are literally all carrying phones 24x7. Let's just use our phones. @evan If you have my phone number you can make it ring any time. If I don't know you and you send me a zoom link I don't have to click on it. I run ~3 businesses and have kids who go to school, I kinda need to answer my phone.  @evan Well, group video + text chat isn't really all that well federated on phones right now and I don't at all miss dialing into multiplayer voice-only conferences for work @lmorchard I agree! Also weird that it is handled by mobile phone manufacturers rather than telecom providers.  @evan in my circles, it started years ago when people didn't want to pay for (international) SMS so they switched to messaging apps @driscoll yeah, agreed. I think that's less of a big deal now. My SMS messages are free and unlimited. Also, wow, those well.com accounts are cool! @evan same here. I sprung for unlimited texts a longggg time ago but maybe flat rate plans weren't as common across outside of N America?  @evan Others have already said good answers (cost, video, privacy). Iโll also add audio quality fwiw. My counter question is why bother with Fediverse when IRC already exists? @evan I can talk to anyone in the world with it, if I'm willing to deal with longer names. That's the only argument about phone numbers that matters, and it applies to IRC, doesn't it? People care about features and POTS doesn't have good features. I'm not sure what you're angling for with this line of questioning, but to me the conclusion to be drawn is โfederation on its own is not a selling point if the system is lacking the features people care aboutโ. Group video chat needs to be made free, secure, and easy to use for any user on any platform. @evan SMS is a best effort notification with no indication it was delivered. You can lose messages, or get them delayed by hours. Also, carriers charged 25 cents per message back in the day. Whatsapp on the other hand shows you the message was delivered, it's almost always instantaneous. Downside, you need data connection. Back in the 2010s in a trip in Scotland, whatsapp managed to receive and send its messages before android could update its icon to indicate there's an internet connection. @evan @tom People use OTT services instead of SMS/MMS because: - MMS isn't great at groupchats. @evan oh, ho, but just you try and join that club now... You'll need spectrum, and an operating license from a member state of the ITU - which only accepts membership from full UN members. Good luck... @steely_glint oh, yeah, I'm not saying it's great. It takes a lot more to break into telecom than to start a Fediverse server.  @evan That is also going backwards, though! iMessage on iPhone to Google Messages on Android and vice versa is going *backwards* in user experience! @evan Side note: this was true in non-GSM markets like the US and Japan; conversely, I worked for several years at an operator in Asia where the top two GSM carriers were engaged in a proxy war for their parent companies who were competitors in their home markets, and as part of that, refused to carry each otherโs SMS traffic, leading to most businesspeople carrying two phones for a few years.   @evan it really sucks actually. I just moved to Berlin and I can't keep my phone number to tie it to any provider here cause the routes are country specific. So to make an analogy to the fediverse it's like only being able to move to a new account INSIDE an instance or maybe only between mastodon and not between mastodon and WordPress etc @evan I now have a Berlin number. I can't text or call US numbers cause the plan I have doesn't allow it. I would have to pay 2 times as much if I wanted to text message a US number  @evan Unless you try to start a phone company. They won't connect you to the network if you don't jump through their hoops. I've noticed that iPhones may default to only sending MMS and never send SMS, so anyone who uses an iPhone may be incompatible with SMS for this reason. Most iPhone users cannot send SMS messages, which makes them unable to send messages to my phone. I'm not an expert, so I can't confidently verify any of this, and this is purely just my anecdotal experience.  @evan@cosocial.ca |
SMS is also remarkably well federated. In the early 2000s, every carrier had their own text messaging platform. Today, you can send an SMS to practically anyone.