How to chat with your friends in 2025?! 🤔

And how NOT to build the next standard

A 15 minutes talk

Use space to go to the next slide

https://xkcd.com/927/

Presentation 🤠

  • I’m Pascal Isman / lascapi
  • Full-stack web developer
  • Free software
  • Blues/pop guitarist
  • I have worked on a project called MIO (Open Instant Messenger) for a year in my spare time. I will talk about it later.

A quick overview 🥏

Focus

  • I’m going to talk more about the internet ecosystem and economy than technical stuff.

IM Definition

For me, for today:

  • 👍 IM - Instant Messaging: messages, pictures, files, vocals
  • ❌ Real-time communication: video conf, call, audio conf, real-time whiteboard

Today’s problems ⏳

A LOT of apps.

  • How many apps do you have on your smartphone to chat?

Why? Product differentiation

A business practice

  • If you want to sell something, a product or a service, it’s better to be different.
  • Think about cars, coffee, every brand in the world …. and of course IM
  • One ‘simple’ way is to have a big closed user base

Open solutions 👏

Emails

  • Email providers are “forced” by the history, the culture and the market.
  • But it’s difficult to be at the same time: open, spam free, secur, easy to use, easy to improve and so on …

SMS

  • They are open because of laws and industrial partnership.
  • The telecom operators have to cooperate by law, and also because of the market. Here the French law: legifrance.gouv.fr
  • “The Authority creates and shares technical details about how things should be set up so that the quality of service is guaranteed.”

Open protocols

  • XMPP, SIP, Matrix are a great ! even IRC !!
  • They evolve and some great apps are based on them
  • But Google Talk, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp “were” based on XMPP
  • Because XMPP allows federation and openness but this is not mandatory!

My project MIO 🤝

What I want to achieve

  • Give people one app that lets them chat with family and friends on different platforms.
  • First partner : XMPP - SIP - Matrix and open standards.
  • Secondly: Whatsapp and Facebook messenger and closed apps.

The new EU law

The DMA (Digital Market Act) says that the gatekeepers are forced to open up to competition.

Meta’s conditions

  • Share your user’s IP to see if they are actually in Europe
  • You are responsible for the spam
  • It’s one2one only (until the next step)

Alone or together?

Alone I can go faster but together we are more resilient, for example, against:

  • Censorship,
  • DoSS,
  • Single point of failure

So the goal for me is to go with other projects and people, maybe you?

Conclusion 😌

I have quite the same age as the internet.
And I have seen it becoming worse and worse.
I also saw a lot of people working to improve the situation.

Now it’s time for me to work with them and put what I am into the common good basket.

Thank you very much!
🙏☺️

Get in touch

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