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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid-on-instagram-tiktok-youtube). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.

    You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.

    I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?


  • I totally agree we can’t simply drop SMS immediately, but what am I missing in supporting backwards compatibility (for example via my pseudo number solution, like how VOIP works) preventing us from moving forward during a stagged shutdown in the span of decades? MMS and RCS both would also fail under cellular data loss, and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters. I’m not sure I buy the argument you can’t have similarly low energy towers (even with net neutrality states, you can still cap all bandwidth per user), and a simpler tower that only does data should be far more reliable than a tower that provides multiple carrier services given the simplicity (and it’s very rare to have towers that only do voice + SMS anymore).


  • Yeah that’s a big problem that I’m trying to research solutions for myself too. It was way better when I could tell people to just install Signal and it’d replace their SMS app but be secure when others use it, but unfortunately Signal dropped SMS. Currently I just have all the apps, but since Signal does contact discovery (like Whatsapp) I follow a Signal, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, RCS (via Google Messenger), then SMS pattern and stopping when I can contact someone. Obviously, this has the issue that all these apps are getting far more data than they need and I’d like to look into a multiplatform app that does e2e. From what I’ve researched so far, Matrix bridges (servers that connect your Matrix account to a third party messaging service) might be the answer.

    I haven’t tried it yet but there is a Matrix bridge that you can host if you are selfhosting a Matrix server (or use a commercial Matrix provider that already hosts it) that will allow you to connect to your Whatsapp friends without needing the Whatsapp app yourself that could be interesting for at least that use case https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html?bridge=whatsapp .




  • Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don’t need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.

    When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It’s all data at the end of the day.

    Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.

    Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.


  • Even if that is an accurate number, there are only ~56 million Americans living in census defined rural areas. With some actual planning we should be able to get missing backbones from our urban areas (which should be getting far more funding). Wireless is also a gamechanger, with microwave, 5g (and nextgen 6g), and Starlink, and that can really reduce this cost since not everyone needs fiber. If we can incorporate requirements for new backbone lines with any greenfield rail or highway projects we can get wireless coverage out faster and cheaper.