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meower-media / client

A Meower client written in Svelte.
https://app.meower.org
MIT License
18 stars 38 forks source link

Differences from existing platforms #239

Closed notramo closed 4 months ago

notramo commented 6 months ago

Matrix is an widely-adopted, federated, and mature chat protocol with a wide variety of clients. It can bridge to many chat networks including Discord, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram DM, and many more.

ActivityPub is a widely-adopted, standardized, federated and mature microblogging and forum protocol (used by Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, Misskey, WriteFreely). Each platform has multiple client app alternatives.

Federation using an existing protocol is an advantage that every open source project needs. Any new ActivityPub-based project starts with an already existing user base, because they can reach users on other servers (even when they are using different software). So does any new Matrix client or server.

What are the advantages of building a centralized platform with no alternative client apps and a user base starting from zero?

HAZARD6896 commented 6 months ago

I appreciate your interest in the project. Essentially, it comes down to a couple factors.

  1. Meower's history. We have gone through many changes over the years without much focus. Over that period of time, developers started creating alternative clients without our "permission", but acceptance. Hence it became part of culture. Changing now would be hard to implement and make it more difficult for our established developers. We do have a bridge to Discord, though.

  2. We want to control moderation and the stream of users, as well as the source of our userbase. Federation is prone to leaking users' information, which obviously causes multiple privacy concerns. Granted, we'd like our userbase to grow, and allowing other people to make clients is the best way to achieve that goal.

Hopefully that answered your question :) feel free to follow up if you have more.

MikeDev101 commented 4 months ago

Closing because of inactivity. Thanks for taking an interest, however!