In my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.
I think some businesses depend on Whatsapp. I remember jumping in a cab in a middle eastern country and they would use voice notes on Whatsapp almost like how you would use a 2 way radio. An hour of losing your normal mode of communication will impact your small business
I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watching. Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?
Jonathan Blow is a good speaker – I haven't seen this talk (will watch later) but I'm sure the content is good.
However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues.
Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.
> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?
I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from.
Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate.
Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999.
Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
US based isn't a concern in this case, as the data they store is pretty much unusable.
They publish the subpoenas they receive and the dump of relevant data to the authorities, and it's usually a timestamp associated with some ID and that's it.
Actually very nice to integrate with. I'm not using Google or Apple in my life. On the phone I'm using sailfish OS, so the main stream apps are not usually ported natively. Fortunately someone used libsignal and added frontend so signal is my main means of communication with friends. And I still don't have to drown into Google or FB services.
Much better in that it is open source (so you can audit the e2ee), and it does a lot about metadata. It is actually better at protecting metadata than many decentralized alternatives.
I'd say it's a lot better since it doesn't do unknown things with your address book. It actually doesn't do any unknown things and the fact that they're US based is irrelevant since they have nothing to give away thanks to E2EE.
I'm presuming GP does not put Signal forward as a solution to outages. But instead uses the opportunity to talk about messengers and show that there are alternatives in general.
Yep. I host my own server and have it federated. That part was simple.
It was a struggle to get my core group of friends to sign up, and I just sort of haven't bothered trying to get anyone outside that group to try it. They are not technical people in the hn sense but are vastly more competent than the average joe.
It's the normies at large who dictate comms platforms really. Things like matching emoji support and easy + performant video and picture sharing are absolutely crucial.
I feel like people don't see the timeline. As much as I hate Zuck, his current 3D playground is probably comparable to a 70's video game, and his vision is that the Metaverse future is Skyrim or GTA5, I guess that'd be a Matrix-like virtual world.
Imagine a headset with a 360 degree camera, so you can broadcast your surroundings, and someone else can wear their VR headset and be seeing what your camera is seeing. Or use some transformation/extra gear so they can view the world/your avatar from a few feet next to you.
What does "doesn't work" mean here, and who learns that lesson?
E-mail is decentralized, but every now and then a hn post pops up, complaining about how you can't run your own email server these days. Billions of people don't use email for personal communication, but use centralized apps like WhatsApp and many businesses do the same with WhatsApp, Slack and similar apps.
To me it looks like running a centralized service works really well for companies like Meta and Google and the fast majority of people pick those services over something else. I don't think many people will change their mind about this because of one outage.
Yeah, WahtsAps is the biggest messaging app in the EU, and I think other Latin-Am countries as well. Whenever it goes down it's bad for business and people.
I tried to convince people to move to Signal, but 1) they're not immune to outages as well, 2) the network effect is too strong, and 3) signal doesn't seem to get the QoL niceties that made WhatsApp appealing in the first place and insisting they know better. No easy chat history backup is a no-go for most people. No live location sharing is also a bummer. Plus their Android app is a second class citizen in quality and lacking tablet support.
This is the time when people search for alternate messaging apps like Signal, Telegram :)
Totally forgot that I have installed both those apps and opened them today after more than a year.
Is it also the time to remind about the fact that Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted? I mean, the "secret chats" are end-to-end encrypted, but if you use Telegram that's the last thing you want to use.
If you use Telegram with only the secret chats, then Signal is better. If you use all the cool features of Telegram, then your communications are not end-to-end encrypted (i.e. the Telegram server and whoever can hack them can read everything).
I sent a couple of WA to a friend, noticed the clock icon, didn't think about it until when I saw these news one hour later. If I really had to hear from her I'd call her or at least send her a SMS (maybe the first one of the year, to anybody.) Same thing if she were one of those friends I'm using Telegram to chat with. I assume that most of them have both WA and Telegram, WA for sure.
Down in Uganda too. I was speaking to my cousin who just had a baby and told her I'd call back in 2 minutes to see the kid and then whatsapp went down!
Sounds like youd maybe want to consider a platform with a lower downtime requirement - isnt sms/phone at like 5min/yr downtime (99.999% up) or whatever?
Readit News
> ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ...
https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704
I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watching. Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?
However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues.
Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.
I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from.
Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate.
Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999.
Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
They publish the subpoenas they receive and the dump of relevant data to the authorities, and it's usually a timestamp associated with some ID and that's it.
https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
Nobody said it was perfect. It's just better.
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At least, that is what I do.
You should recruit people to Matrix , which supports Federation.
It was a struggle to get my core group of friends to sign up, and I just sort of haven't bothered trying to get anyone outside that group to try it. They are not technical people in the hn sense but are vastly more competent than the average joe.
It's the normies at large who dictate comms platforms really. Things like matching emoji support and easy + performant video and picture sharing are absolutely crucial.
1: https://github.com/WhatsApp
The metaverse better be real good, else Meta will be in serious decline.
They’ve invented legs, I’m not sure what else you’d need.
Imagine a headset with a 360 degree camera, so you can broadcast your surroundings, and someone else can wear their VR headset and be seeing what your camera is seeing. Or use some transformation/extra gear so they can view the world/your avatar from a few feet next to you.
E-mail is decentralized, but every now and then a hn post pops up, complaining about how you can't run your own email server these days. Billions of people don't use email for personal communication, but use centralized apps like WhatsApp and many businesses do the same with WhatsApp, Slack and similar apps.
To me it looks like running a centralized service works really well for companies like Meta and Google and the fast majority of people pick those services over something else. I don't think many people will change their mind about this because of one outage.
Decentralization is not a panacea. You just have to pick your poison.
I tried to convince people to move to Signal, but 1) they're not immune to outages as well, 2) the network effect is too strong, and 3) signal doesn't seem to get the QoL niceties that made WhatsApp appealing in the first place and insisting they know better. No easy chat history backup is a no-go for most people. No live location sharing is also a bummer. Plus their Android app is a second class citizen in quality and lacking tablet support.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/meta-quest-pro-hands-...
If you use Telegram with only the secret chats, then Signal is better. If you use all the cool features of Telegram, then your communications are not end-to-end encrypted (i.e. the Telegram server and whoever can hack them can read everything).
Dead Comment