this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I feel like I just read a brochure for a product.
I was doing it more as a wishlist or an idea board to draw opinions from. However, as stated; as nice as it sounds, I'd rather admire the code than have the features without the code. Whoever did this though, was quite thoughtful about risks, including the - the 'bus factor'.
As a comparison, I really liked the "Connect For Lemmy" app when I first joined up.
It has some great features, some of which are still not on Jeboa. The dev even said he'd open the source if there was interest. I gave up on waiting, uninstalled & now use Jeboa on mobile exclusively because Connect is still closed, as far as I know.
I am FOSS or nothing, if I an help it - especially in communications apps. If the source fails to materialise then I will forget this too - even if I can indulge in speculating on the methods used. There is a fair amount of skill & thought required to pull this off. The best part though, I'm hoping, is that as a protocol, it would be a great chat accompaniment to & not a replacement to Lemmy or Mastodon. Again, without the source, I can only guess.
Regardless, the fedi is young enough to be influenced by good ideas early, before it becomes too costly in time, effort & complexity, to undo or implement changes later.
The only thing though is that you spend a whole lot of time/verbosity describing in detail all the good points about the product, and then just mention it's anti-FOSS nature at the very end of your long comment.
Usually someone very pro-FOSS will mention that negative up front.
Or seek to implement those features in a free & open way; but the features have to necessitate the effort & if the features are not clarified then no effort, especially a distributed one can even begin to replicate them. What do you suppose ought to be done first when building an app - the feature request or the code?
In any case, I wrote this right at the top of the post before getting to the good stuff, so you could have stopped there if you wanted to:
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as I see it, the problem in your statement is that while you mention you're pro-FOSS, you got overexcited by the claims of an unknown entity over technologies that you like and at the same time you have no source. Just promises. They could even be a startup that has just put all the buzzwords there while in fact on their code they don't do anything of that and they just use a centralized server with symetric encryption and have the symmetric key stored in the code. The app will look like it works till proven that it is not. As long as they don't want to publish their code, you getting overexcited (at least for me), is pointless.
There was an example with a startup that was doing something similar to that, not in that magnitude with a stored key, but something equally bullshit until they were exposed. Quite early in their journey. Cannot remember the name right now but there was a good analysis by a researcher. If I remember it, I will add it.