Hey, co-founder here - we think we've fixed this message delivery issue for Australia. Could you try again and let me know if you're still having issues? Sorry about that!
The default setting when you join a group is that threads are not muted by default, but you can change a per-group setting to instead only be notified if you choose to reply, or explicitly subscribe to, each thread.
I get his beef with Slack, but this is just Discord for people who don't want to talk to Android users. What's his problem with Discord, other than uselessly calling it ugly?
I don't really like Discord's threads. They're basically a channel nested inside of a channel, but they don't really interact with or get exposed in the outer channel. And by default, they disappear after a while. And the threads are kind of hard to find if you haven't joined them yet.
Something that has a UX more like traditional forums as a chat app sounds neat to me.
I don't have a "beef" with Discord, but I have the feeling I really don't get it when I use it.
I joined a couple of servers related to games I play and some sports. But I feel like there's conversations going on that I can't see. Do I need to message some special bot? Do I need an invite or be admitted before I can see some hidden channels? There are voice chats, there are so many settings.
I definitely feel like I need someone to handhold and clue me in to a few more things about it before I feel "comfortable" using it. Discord is a lot to deal with.
FWIW, that's more a matter of customizations for those servers than Discord in general. Vanilla discord is... still kind of annoying, but not terribly confusing. Mostly just Slack with voice/video chat and bad threading.
Keep in mind that the messaging ecosystem is big enough for multiple winners. Over the past few decades, there seems to be a continual churn where a handful of messaging apps dominate at any given time without a single one taking over completely.
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but how can an app claim end-to-end encryption with a privacy first mindset while also using an AI chatbot run by a third party company? What actually is being shared with OpenAI?
Hi, cofounder here. We're very transparent in the UI about the fact that messages that mention @AI are not covered by e2ee. See https://imgur.com/a/5kPEdQP
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted.
That is good to know and thanks for the clarification. With this operating at the message level and not the thread or group level, is context still preserved to actually have a conversation with GPT?
Yes. Each time you mention @AI in a thread, all prior mentions of @AI in the same thread, as well as its prior responses (up to the token limit for GPT-3.5) are resubmitted to the OpenAI API, so that it can continue the conversation including prior context.
The app has an “@AI” user which needs to be mentioned for the data to be shared. Chef’s kiss emoji from me in terms of transparency. Also, if you DM @AI it calls out that the message will be shared with OpenAI and Wavelength.
Good on the transparency for sure, but then again a messaging app where the headlining, differenciating factor is something that encourages dropping privacy protections from within the chat feels conceptually awkward to me.
Imagine a group chat on Signal, but in the middle of the chat dangles a big carrot enticing other group members to forward the discussion to OpenAI conveniently.
Sure, there's various other ways someone you talk to could do this silently. But ignorance is bliss vs. an inline feature to flaunt it.
Given its place in the orbit of tastemaker-market, iOS-exclusive apps, I expected Wavelength to require a paid subscription for access. I was surprised to see that the developers plan a freemium model.
Of course, a paid-only model would put a hard ceiling on the total addressable market, but they have an interesting challenge ahead in finding something that a sustainable number of users will want to pay for.
This app is dead in the water. That doesn't mean it's not gonna provide some usefulness to groups of people, just that a iOS-only, freemium group chat will never reach mass appeal if their goal is to make money off of it.
Yup, the group-chat-thread-first model sounds very interesting
But, iOS only/first is a nonstarter for a huge portion of the population. If they're just trying to experiment is a small pond first to get it right (sort of as a throwaway version), then that is excellent. If they're planning to stay in the Apple walled garden exclusively or as a first-class/peasants model, then, well, good luck with that.
The fine article already mentions in the body and at the summary at the end that an Android client is planned but they have a small team so it will take time:
Wavelength is currently available only for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. An Android app is planned (see next item)
…
As mentioned above, Wavelength’s development team is very small. Two people, Henry and Patterson. That puts a limit on how much they can accomplish — hence the lack of an Android app at the moment.
Regardless, I don’t personally have any interest in this App at this time.
I mean, they are two people, and this product just left beta. They certainly need to prioritize. That would be equally true if they'd started with Android.
And it's especially true early in the development of any product, when major decisions are still being made, and even more true when there are sudden bursts of uptake, which can impact infrastructure in unexpected ways, which can then affect architectural decisions about the app.
Trying to do all of that on two platforms simultaneously is almost certainly an unnecessary dilution of effort this early in the development of the product.
That doesn't make Android an afterthought. It just makes it next.
I think you overestimate how huge that proportion of the population actually is. Android users heavily skew older and less interested in technology. Yes there are some tech users who use android for ideological reasons, but they are a small minority.
In terms of addressable market, Android isn’t a stumbling block to begin with.
It's iOS/Mac only which makes it a non starter in most of Europe. We're 70% Android here.
But anyway I'm not looking for the next chat app anymore.. there's already too many. I bridge everything to matrix now to have everything in one place. WhatsApp, signal, telegram, discord, slack etc. I don't want to use this new thing until a bridge becomes available to it and some of my contacts prefer it as their main contact method. It sounds like this is a long way away.
I’m going to give this a try, but I wish we could just expand the sms protocol and make interoperability a non event. Wishful utopian thinking, I know, but messaging as a protocol would be a much bigger commercial platform than silod apps. Source: the gdp of the internet vs the gdp of the app stores
- Privacy focused (majority of users do not care about this, all modern chat apps have e2ee already)
- Natively runs on Apple devices (without Android/Windows version, good luck getting a large user base, especially with 2 developers)
- An AI chatbot (discord/slack already have this?)
- A groups -> threads -> messages layout. Like they mentioned, the same as slack but less corporate. Seems like a good idea since Slack is pretty awful for personal use.
The article could've done less without the author patting themselves on the back about how amazing their opinions offered were.
In tech years that was a different age. Early iphone years apps were novel and could easily gain traction just for being an app (like in 2023 how anything that talks to GPT4 gets people super excited)
so I have to use slack at work, and my social interactions with friends, family and acquaintances are split across fb messenger, telegram, slack, discord, skype, WhatsApp, google chat, SMS, twitter dms and probably a few more I'm forgetting. on some of those platforms, I talk to as little as 1 single person.
I don't understand what could possibly drive anyone to making a new messaging app at this point. Even if your app has impenetrable privacy, impeccable ui, and amazingly useful features - it's not going to improve the horrible experience of wrangling a zillion of other messaging apps - and if your users have friends, they'll have to do that anyway. At this point, making another one of these feels like some kind of sadistic joke.
I wish to incinerate all messaging apps.
P.S.: to clarify - it's not like I even _want_ to use more than half of the messengers I listed. I am _forced to_, because some people I want to talk to are only available on certain platforms.
When the only friend you talk to on platform A moves to platform B, then you will move to platform B. You've already shown that you're OK having your chat spread across the services, so while it may be annoying to you, it doesn't seem like a show stopper for a new platform.
Sounds like the fundamental bet here is that design and privacy are meaningful differentiators in this market.
With regard to design, Wavelength's particular, native aesthetic might have a certain kind of emotional appeal to old-school Mac and iOS users (including me), but fundamentally its conversation view works a lot like Discord's, which also supports threads and basic replies. I don't think they're going to win on "quiet" design alone.
In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line. They'll need to make compromises one way or the other, either tolerating a greater sense of "cacophony" or forgoing features that other platforms support.
Their positioning and followthrough on privacy are strong.
Although Wavelength seems to be well-crafted, I think its success, like the success of many other network-oriented products, is going to largely come down to go-to-market. As an adviser and cheerleader, John gives them meaningful reach, but whether they can capitalize on that reach will depend on whether they can build a compelling enough hook to get people to move from wherever they're having conversations today.
Yes, I've used Discord on my Mac, Linux machine, Android phone, and the web. I understand the hate on Electron apps, but being everywhere all at once is why people make that technological tradeoff. It's even more important when you only have two developers.
> Wavelength's particular, native aesthetic might have a certain kind of emotional appeal to old-school Mac and iOS users
It's not just old school. It's a "Mac-assed Mac app" [1]. Unfortunately even Apple themselves have stopped caring about making highly polished native Mac/iOS-assed apps. And that could be a huge differentiator if it wasn't just indie developers embracing this, but the platform itself.
> In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line.
Disagree on threads - it may be the same feature in name but wavelength and discord implement them very differently. Discord threads are not default whereas WL are, which means discord chats are noisy and threads are rarely used. The critique of slack/discord being very noisy is on point (I’ve heard them called ‘information treadmills’), whereas WL is more akin to a forum’s topic model but applied to chat. It seems promising
I am wary of Wavelength due to unclear business model (it’s not paid and promises can’t rule out another future double-sided market where I’m the product) and won’t use it because any integration with ClosedAI makes me uncomfortable (I don’t need an LLM at my side when chatting with friends, and if I needed it I’d expect it can be run natively on Apple Neural).
I have great respect for your current work and assurances on the business model. But what you are asserting is only _currently_ in your gift.
If you keep controlling equity stakes in the business and don't need to raise significant outside investment it will work out as per your business model.
If you get into enterprise selling, you'll need a sales workforce and significant cost of Sales/Goods/Administration. If you want only organic growth, you'll be ok. But what will happen is that investment from, or selling to a large corporate, will turbo boost such sales; the temptation proves irresistible to many. If you are in a land-grab dynamics with other companies, growth may actually mean survival.
There is a scalability tier above the best subscription businesses, which is mass-market consumer adoption. The twitter experience demonstrates this. The ad revenue across billions outweighs a tidy subscription revenue from a small highly engaged subscription crowd. Any significant co-investor will find the lure of this irresistible. If you gain private equity investors, you will become ad based with high probability.
I welcome your contribution to the field of messaging apps and wish you well. I hope that this can inform your judgements about business models going forwards. If you think this is incorrect, please follow up with your alternative thoughts.
> We will never run ads. We plan to make money primarily by offering pro subscriptions and a version of Wavelength for organizations.
There are so many corporations that made similar pledges only to break them when it became advantageous for them to do so. Is there any mechanism that actually would enforce it? Mechanism that wouldn't disappear with a single stroke of pen?
There is: make the service paid from get go and put things like this in writing as part of the contract. Money changes hands, there’s something to risk being sued over.
Going for network effect with a free offering means there has to be investment money keeping the lights on. Those investors will want their returns.
Such a mechanism simply doesn't exist. A company can't simply force itself to keep this promise unless you actually trust its leadership. Similar to how Substack authors sometimes start running ads on their paid newsletters.
Privacy and "there are people you don't know in the group" seem in tension. I sort of get it since that's how a company works, but it doesn't seem like "real" privacy when you don't know who will read what you wrote.
Similarly, if someone new can join and they can read what you wrote, it doesn't seem very private. Your audience is not only the people in the group, but a person to be named later. (Screenshots are always a possibility, but this is normalizing it.)
This goes double for having AI in the chat. The AI needs to read all the messages, so doesn't that mean the Wavelength needs a private key?
At that point, I'm not sure that end-to-end encryption matters. The chat might as well be stored on Wavelength's servers.
We're very transparent in the UI about the fact that messages that mention @AI are not covered by e2ee. See https://imgur.com/a/5kPEdQP
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted. Our servers don't have access to any users' private keys -- those are generated on each client and never transmitted, except in the case when a user logs in on secondary device and uses our QR-code transfer flow (in which case the sensitive information is communicated peer-to-per in that QR code). We'll share much more on this when we publish our tech blog in the coming weeks.
Regarding privacy around strangers joining a group -- Wavelength supports locking down groups to the degree the group creator chooses. You can disable history syncing, so that new members don't get a copy of prior history (which, when enabled, is reencrypted and sent by prior members of the group) when they join. And groups only grow to a size where there would be people you don't know in them, if someone chose to share an invite link semi-publicly, or allow all members to invite new members (which is also a setting the creator can toggle). Personally, I'm in a number of quite large groups including people I don't know in real life, as well as plenty of groups with 2-10 friends I know in real life, where I obviously trust everybody not to screenshot/share what I'm writing, and I appreciate having strong e2ee.
Really any of the platforms can support it. Reddit has 'reddiquette' and all it would take is allow reporting on more civility-oriented offenses (like cursing, etc...).
Most social networks currently don't allow reporting low-level offenses so it's either a major violation or just ignored entirely. I would greatly prefer Reddit and Twitter if I could cut out large chunks of low quality posters.
I guess there is something to be said about your speech having intended consequences (ie, preventing attacks/vitriol), but unintended consequences...
Arguably everything is E2E encrypted but that won't prevent someone in the discussion from taking a screenshot (thus removing context) and tweeting it, will it?
Sure, but also chat software usually makes group chats possible, and with some (eg. telegram) you have groups with 100k+ people there.
Considering the amount of politically-incorrect, politically-sensitive etc. stuff (ukraine-russia war, anti government protests, recently anti-covid protests, basic software/... piracy, ...), having anonimity is a huge feature.
Discord is groups > channels > messages but doesn’t use threads (I believe).
MS Teams is groups > channels > threads > messages
But yea this does feel like forum arrangement. Which is really the most useful format for longer term conversations. Discord is great for “today and tomorrow matters yesterday doesn’t (yolo).
Not sure what your point is, but even if on some level they accomplish the same thing (exchanging messages on a specific topic) they are very different things (slow/fast, public/private).
This is an encrypted chat app where group chats are the main focus.
The tree of: Groups > Threads > Messages is a forum.
Forums have had private forums, public forums, paid forums, encrypted, shared, only trusted device networks, for everyone, federated.
My point is that this isn't new, and that's a good thing.
It resonates, "it clicked", because it's something we recognise.
When we recognise something then we can also tap into the deep history and learn from the possibilities of that and also reflect on how they failed at times (against social media).
I love forums, I would love to see forums become the predominant form of messaging again. Forums yield slower and richer conversations between groups as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of thousands.
Calling it what it is helps access the past and peer into the future.
The big problem with forums are when threads became too long. Either because people go off-topic, or just because the thread has been going on for months / years.
If they could somehow fix that issue, that would be awesome.
The same number of messages are made, why arbitrarily force the discussion to be broken up? Embracing what the users want to do, how they want to us it, is a great way to discover non-obvious uses and to be low friction for them.
Just looked, and on one of the forums I run there's a thread with more than 130K replies https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/133015/ and so long as it loads fast and people are enjoying it, it's fine.
I just think that monster threads are hard to skim if you haven't been following them from the beginning. On big forums, I'll go through the list of threads to see if there's something interesting. The thread titles make it easy to skip stuff I am not interested in.
If there's a thread with 100 pages the title probably says little about the topic. There's probably some interesting comments in there, but I don't want to go through 100 pages...
Zulip, too, has done a similar thing for a while, I think, with threads in categories. The UI is a little more chat-derived than most forums, but there's an obvious connection.
It's good. I hope it becomes more a popular thing.
> Messages on Wavelength are completely private and secure, using state of the art end-to-end encryption.
All of the state of the art end-to-end encryption in products I know of is free software.
Much more difficult to verify these claims otherwise.
Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.
Any conversation that includes OpenAI's GPT also necessarily can't be "completely private" or end to end encrypted as the service must have a plaintext of the messages to proxy them (in cleartext from their view) to their OpenAI APIs. It also then, you know, uploads your messages to OpenAI.
What's the point of e2ee messaging if the service provider and OpenAI can read it all the moment you loop in the headline feature (GPT in your groupchat)?
Ultimately, threaded e2ee groupchat is a feature (ideally a feature added to Signal), not an app/company.
> Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.
FWIW, it’s up to the user whether to allow that. I don’t recall the language the app uses to describe the contact request, it seemed reasonable but I didn’t allow it.
Correct. Sharing contact information is opt-in, and what gets stored on the server is only salted and hashed phone numbers, not even names. It’s just a way to find people on Wavelength whose phone numbers are in your contacts. Also, if you later choose to delete your contacts from Wavelength, everything stored on the server is deleted. The privacy policy makes this clear, I think.
Salting and hashing phone numbers doesn’t do much to obfuscate them because the whole range of phone numbers is brute-forcible. Wavelength (or any attacker who gains access to Wavelength’s database) effectively has all phone numbers users upload. To reverse the hashing, just compute 10 million hashes per valid US area code.
And it’s a tiny amount of work if you just want to know which users have a contact with one specific phone number.
Much better would be to store no contact information at all server-side.
How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?
The fixation on unmoderated freedom of speech is… obsessive. If they make a nice community for people who wanna talk to each other on those terms, good for them. Maybe it’s nice. Maybe it’s a heavily moderated echo chamber. Maybe it’s not for you, that’s fine.
What do you get by standing on the sidelines going “that’s abhorrent! Dear god nooooooooo…”?
It’s weird. You’re being weird. Chill out. Live and let be…
It’s ok to build this kind of stuff. It’s… so, utterly, utterly uncontroversial. Who cares?
Forced use of real names results in sexism and racism. It enables people to stalk and harass other users in real life. It's just a fundamentally bad idea.
There's room for a range of decisions about 'forced civility', but 'real names' is a bad idea.
"use your real name and just be civil" is great if you're in a position of power, a classic move to shut down people with legitimate grievances and create an echo chamber for privilege, people can build whatever they want, but it doesn't make it not cringe as hell
there's such a deep history of this approach being used to silence minorities in this country
I'm not a fan of forcing civility, myself, as the forcing, itself, is uncivil.
But I do feel that it's OK to establish a community/context, where a set of rules governs the decorum, and allow people to either join, or leave. If people don't want to abide by those rules, then it is OK (incumbent, even) for the community to sanction them; but only in the context of that community. I'm not into calling up a troll's workplace, and trying to get them fired. I think it's OK to ban them, though.
They'll vote with their feet. If they like it, they'll stay. If they don't, they'll leave, and it will wither on the vine. Elon Musk is doing exactly that, with the new Twitter. Personally, I don't want to play in that sandlot, but a lot of others, do. I won't go and try to stop them.
I've spent most of my life, in a mutual support community that has a very specific culture and set of rules. We don't have a police force to enforce them, but we also won't change them for any rando that insists that we do so, for their convenience. We've been doing things this way, since before I was born, and will continue to do so, forever (hopefully).
It's like walking into a Jewish Temple, or Islamic Mosque, and saying "I love pork, and it is my right to eat pork. I also want to join your organization, so I insist that you start allowing the eating of pork."
Even worse, in the organization that I'm involved with, there are commercial interests that would like us to change, and we can get some very strange pressures. Sort of like paid pork-eaters, showing up at synagogues, and demanding pork reform.
Just let the dervishes whirl. If it's meant to last, it will. If not, it will become another footnote in history.
It may also change, but that's no guarantee, and I have watched changes destroy good things. Good ol' Chesterton's Fence...
> How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?
I take issue with “enforced civility” alongside “real names”.
Fixation on civility promotes tone over content.
For example, this very thread!
Despite my comment having several upvotes, and despite the fact that it did actually spark a curious conversation as per the guidance in the rules, you are the only person that got a chance to respond to me before comments were turned off on my post.
Is it absolutely clear what I was criticizing? Yes. Was I criticizing something that others might agree with or at the very least discuss? Again, yes.
Did it fit into the arbitrary rules of decorum that a handful of individual users decided to enforce in this instance? No.
If you agree with “enforced civility”, do you think that you should have had the ability to post your response? The current set of civility enforcers are of the opinion that nobody on this entire website should be about to respond directly to “Oh god no.” because it so soundly shakes them to their cores that you, as a user, should be protected from seeing or responding to it.
The app is free and it has no in-app purchase - how do they make money to support development?
What happened to "if you're not paying, you're the product"?
To register, you need to enter your phone number.
Even telegram now allows creating an account without a phone number, why is this still a requirement?
Thanks, but no thanks.
[downvote all you want, but we're complaining about facebook and others, while replacing them with a new, shiny social network, that has the same pitfalls, just because Gruber recommends it - we never learn]
App Store search is broken, they are doing the Google thing where they want you to buy ads so people find your app when you type its name in the search box.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadI tested it, and indeed it was entirely wrong about how to force a provisioned concurrency AWS Lambda function to reload.
threads become like subgroups I guess, with names, changing member lists - and ... ? retention policy? delete permissions? ai summaries?
EDIT: I thought his "it's AI in a group chat" pitch sounded familiar, then I realized it's because it's a Discord blog post from a couple weeks ago: https://discord.com/blog/ai-on-discord-your-place-for-ai-wit...
a) better threading UX
b) E2E encryption
admittedly I'm a very casual Discord user, and haven't used this app at all yet, so I may be missing something.
Also, sounds like the Android app is coming, so I don't think "don't want to talk to Android users" is an intended sales point?
Something that has a UX more like traditional forums as a chat app sounds neat to me.
I joined a couple of servers related to games I play and some sports. But I feel like there's conversations going on that I can't see. Do I need to message some special bot? Do I need an invite or be admitted before I can see some hidden channels? There are voice chats, there are so many settings.
I definitely feel like I need someone to handhold and clue me in to a few more things about it before I feel "comfortable" using it. Discord is a lot to deal with.
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted.
Imagine a group chat on Signal, but in the middle of the chat dangles a big carrot enticing other group members to forward the discussion to OpenAI conveniently.
Sure, there's various other ways someone you talk to could do this silently. But ignorance is bliss vs. an inline feature to flaunt it.
Of course, a paid-only model would put a hard ceiling on the total addressable market, but they have an interesting challenge ahead in finding something that a sustainable number of users will want to pay for.
But, iOS only/first is a nonstarter for a huge portion of the population. If they're just trying to experiment is a small pond first to get it right (sort of as a throwaway version), then that is excellent. If they're planning to stay in the Apple walled garden exclusively or as a first-class/peasants model, then, well, good luck with that.
Wavelength is currently available only for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. An Android app is planned (see next item) … As mentioned above, Wavelength’s development team is very small. Two people, Henry and Patterson. That puts a limit on how much they can accomplish — hence the lack of an Android app at the moment.
Regardless, I don’t personally have any interest in this App at this time.
And it's especially true early in the development of any product, when major decisions are still being made, and even more true when there are sudden bursts of uptake, which can impact infrastructure in unexpected ways, which can then affect architectural decisions about the app.
Trying to do all of that on two platforms simultaneously is almost certainly an unnecessary dilution of effort this early in the development of the product.
That doesn't make Android an afterthought. It just makes it next.
In terms of addressable market, Android isn’t a stumbling block to begin with.
But anyway I'm not looking for the next chat app anymore.. there's already too many. I bridge everything to matrix now to have everything in one place. WhatsApp, signal, telegram, discord, slack etc. I don't want to use this new thing until a bridge becomes available to it and some of my contacts prefer it as their main contact method. It sounds like this is a long way away.
What wavelength offers:
- Privacy focused (majority of users do not care about this, all modern chat apps have e2ee already)
- Natively runs on Apple devices (without Android/Windows version, good luck getting a large user base, especially with 2 developers)
- An AI chatbot (discord/slack already have this?)
- A groups -> threads -> messages layout. Like they mentioned, the same as slack but less corporate. Seems like a good idea since Slack is pretty awful for personal use.
The article could've done less without the author patting themselves on the back about how amazing their opinions offered were.
Instagram comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Instagram
Surely you realize that picking one of the most successful apps created this past decade is not the resounding endorsement you think it is.
You must be new here
I don't understand what could possibly drive anyone to making a new messaging app at this point. Even if your app has impenetrable privacy, impeccable ui, and amazingly useful features - it's not going to improve the horrible experience of wrangling a zillion of other messaging apps - and if your users have friends, they'll have to do that anyway. At this point, making another one of these feels like some kind of sadistic joke.
I wish to incinerate all messaging apps.
P.S.: to clarify - it's not like I even _want_ to use more than half of the messengers I listed. I am _forced to_, because some people I want to talk to are only available on certain platforms.
With regard to design, Wavelength's particular, native aesthetic might have a certain kind of emotional appeal to old-school Mac and iOS users (including me), but fundamentally its conversation view works a lot like Discord's, which also supports threads and basic replies. I don't think they're going to win on "quiet" design alone.
In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line. They'll need to make compromises one way or the other, either tolerating a greater sense of "cacophony" or forgoing features that other platforms support.
Their positioning and followthrough on privacy are strong.
Although Wavelength seems to be well-crafted, I think its success, like the success of many other network-oriented products, is going to largely come down to go-to-market. As an adviser and cheerleader, John gives them meaningful reach, but whether they can capitalize on that reach will depend on whether they can build a compelling enough hook to get people to move from wherever they're having conversations today.
It's not just old school. It's a "Mac-assed Mac app" [1]. Unfortunately even Apple themselves have stopped caring about making highly polished native Mac/iOS-assed apps. And that could be a huge differentiator if it wasn't just indie developers embracing this, but the platform itself.
> In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line.
Wat? Half-assed designs isn't "feature competitiveness".
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
> Me: @AI What weighs more: a pound of flesh or a Great British Pound?
> AI: They both weigh the same amount, one pound.
> Powered by OpenAI GPT-3.5. Be careful, the bot may be completely wrong. Only messages that mention @AI are visible to the bot in this group.
This kind of reasoning is easy for GPT-4.
It's great to see messengers incorporate AI.
What's your moat here against a GPT Telegram bot?
If you keep controlling equity stakes in the business and don't need to raise significant outside investment it will work out as per your business model.
If you get into enterprise selling, you'll need a sales workforce and significant cost of Sales/Goods/Administration. If you want only organic growth, you'll be ok. But what will happen is that investment from, or selling to a large corporate, will turbo boost such sales; the temptation proves irresistible to many. If you are in a land-grab dynamics with other companies, growth may actually mean survival.
There is a scalability tier above the best subscription businesses, which is mass-market consumer adoption. The twitter experience demonstrates this. The ad revenue across billions outweighs a tidy subscription revenue from a small highly engaged subscription crowd. Any significant co-investor will find the lure of this irresistible. If you gain private equity investors, you will become ad based with high probability.
I welcome your contribution to the field of messaging apps and wish you well. I hope that this can inform your judgements about business models going forwards. If you think this is incorrect, please follow up with your alternative thoughts.
There are so many corporations that made similar pledges only to break them when it became advantageous for them to do so. Is there any mechanism that actually would enforce it? Mechanism that wouldn't disappear with a single stroke of pen?
Going for network effect with a free offering means there has to be investment money keeping the lights on. Those investors will want their returns.
Similarly, if someone new can join and they can read what you wrote, it doesn't seem very private. Your audience is not only the people in the group, but a person to be named later. (Screenshots are always a possibility, but this is normalizing it.)
This goes double for having AI in the chat. The AI needs to read all the messages, so doesn't that mean the Wavelength needs a private key?
At that point, I'm not sure that end-to-end encryption matters. The chat might as well be stored on Wavelength's servers.
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted. Our servers don't have access to any users' private keys -- those are generated on each client and never transmitted, except in the case when a user logs in on secondary device and uses our QR-code transfer flow (in which case the sensitive information is communicated peer-to-per in that QR code). We'll share much more on this when we publish our tech blog in the coming weeks.
Regarding privacy around strangers joining a group -- Wavelength supports locking down groups to the degree the group creator chooses. You can disable history syncing, so that new members don't get a copy of prior history (which, when enabled, is reencrypted and sent by prior members of the group) when they join. And groups only grow to a size where there would be people you don't know in them, if someone chose to share an invite link semi-publicly, or allow all members to invite new members (which is also a setting the creator can toggle). Personally, I'm in a number of quite large groups including people I don't know in real life, as well as plenty of groups with 2-10 friends I know in real life, where I obviously trust everybody not to screenshot/share what I'm writing, and I appreciate having strong e2ee.
> “something like Twitter but with real names and enforced civility, and with hashtags as Slack-like channels of interest.”
but why is having real names on a chat app a good thing? Considering what's happening worldwide, anonymity online should always come first.
Most social networks currently don't allow reporting low-level offenses so it's either a major violation or just ignored entirely. I would greatly prefer Reddit and Twitter if I could cut out large chunks of low quality posters.
- this obnoxious user, anywhere
- this obnoxious user, in this thread/group
- this obnoxious user, using any of these keywords
- any user using these keywords in this thread/group/anywhere
Any social media system that doesn't offer these needs a much more expensive moderation system.
Arguably everything is E2E encrypted but that won't prevent someone in the discussion from taking a screenshot (thus removing context) and tweeting it, will it?
Considering the amount of politically-incorrect, politically-sensitive etc. stuff (ukraine-russia war, anti government protests, recently anti-covid protests, basic software/... piracy, ...), having anonimity is a huge feature.
By making Groups hierarchical they can even reinvent Forums.
MS Teams is groups > channels > threads > messages
But yea this does feel like forum arrangement. Which is really the most useful format for longer term conversations. Discord is great for “today and tomorrow matters yesterday doesn’t (yolo).
Team's threads vs messages are so similar users often don't understand them
No one has usenet style threads yet
On a mobile device.
And called a messaging app.
But it's a forum.
This is an encrypted chat app where group chats are the main focus.
Forums have had private forums, public forums, paid forums, encrypted, shared, only trusted device networks, for everyone, federated.
My point is that this isn't new, and that's a good thing.
It resonates, "it clicked", because it's something we recognise.
When we recognise something then we can also tap into the deep history and learn from the possibilities of that and also reflect on how they failed at times (against social media).
I love forums, I would love to see forums become the predominant form of messaging again. Forums yield slower and richer conversations between groups as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of thousands.
Calling it what it is helps access the past and peer into the future.
If they could somehow fix that issue, that would be awesome.
The same number of messages are made, why arbitrarily force the discussion to be broken up? Embracing what the users want to do, how they want to us it, is a great way to discover non-obvious uses and to be low friction for them.
Just looked, and on one of the forums I run there's a thread with more than 130K replies https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/133015/ and so long as it loads fast and people are enjoying it, it's fine.
If there's a thread with 100 pages the title probably says little about the topic. There's probably some interesting comments in there, but I don't want to go through 100 pages...
It's good. I hope it becomes more a popular thing.
But yeah, article gives some glimpse of hope for communities.
All of the state of the art end-to-end encryption in products I know of is free software.
Much more difficult to verify these claims otherwise.
Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.
Any conversation that includes OpenAI's GPT also necessarily can't be "completely private" or end to end encrypted as the service must have a plaintext of the messages to proxy them (in cleartext from their view) to their OpenAI APIs. It also then, you know, uploads your messages to OpenAI.
What's the point of e2ee messaging if the service provider and OpenAI can read it all the moment you loop in the headline feature (GPT in your groupchat)?
Ultimately, threaded e2ee groupchat is a feature (ideally a feature added to Signal), not an app/company.
FWIW, it’s up to the user whether to allow that. I don’t recall the language the app uses to describe the contact request, it seemed reasonable but I didn’t allow it.
And it’s a tiny amount of work if you just want to know which users have a contact with one specific phone number.
Much better would be to store no contact information at all server-side.
How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?
The fixation on unmoderated freedom of speech is… obsessive. If they make a nice community for people who wanna talk to each other on those terms, good for them. Maybe it’s nice. Maybe it’s a heavily moderated echo chamber. Maybe it’s not for you, that’s fine.
What do you get by standing on the sidelines going “that’s abhorrent! Dear god nooooooooo…”?
It’s weird. You’re being weird. Chill out. Live and let be…
It’s ok to build this kind of stuff. It’s… so, utterly, utterly uncontroversial. Who cares?
Because 30 years ago the name of most people would, at best, appear in a local newspaper and they remained anonymous to the wider world.
There's room for a range of decisions about 'forced civility', but 'real names' is a bad idea.
https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...
there's such a deep history of this approach being used to silence minorities in this country
But I do feel that it's OK to establish a community/context, where a set of rules governs the decorum, and allow people to either join, or leave. If people don't want to abide by those rules, then it is OK (incumbent, even) for the community to sanction them; but only in the context of that community. I'm not into calling up a troll's workplace, and trying to get them fired. I think it's OK to ban them, though.
They'll vote with their feet. If they like it, they'll stay. If they don't, they'll leave, and it will wither on the vine. Elon Musk is doing exactly that, with the new Twitter. Personally, I don't want to play in that sandlot, but a lot of others, do. I won't go and try to stop them.
I've spent most of my life, in a mutual support community that has a very specific culture and set of rules. We don't have a police force to enforce them, but we also won't change them for any rando that insists that we do so, for their convenience. We've been doing things this way, since before I was born, and will continue to do so, forever (hopefully).
It's like walking into a Jewish Temple, or Islamic Mosque, and saying "I love pork, and it is my right to eat pork. I also want to join your organization, so I insist that you start allowing the eating of pork."
Even worse, in the organization that I'm involved with, there are commercial interests that would like us to change, and we can get some very strange pressures. Sort of like paid pork-eaters, showing up at synagogues, and demanding pork reform.
Just let the dervishes whirl. If it's meant to last, it will. If not, it will become another footnote in history.
It may also change, but that's no guarantee, and I have watched changes destroy good things. Good ol' Chesterton's Fence...
I take issue with “enforced civility” alongside “real names”.
Fixation on civility promotes tone over content.
For example, this very thread!
Despite my comment having several upvotes, and despite the fact that it did actually spark a curious conversation as per the guidance in the rules, you are the only person that got a chance to respond to me before comments were turned off on my post.
Is it absolutely clear what I was criticizing? Yes. Was I criticizing something that others might agree with or at the very least discuss? Again, yes.
Did it fit into the arbitrary rules of decorum that a handful of individual users decided to enforce in this instance? No.
If you agree with “enforced civility”, do you think that you should have had the ability to post your response? The current set of civility enforcers are of the opinion that nobody on this entire website should be about to respond directly to “Oh god no.” because it so soundly shakes them to their cores that you, as a user, should be protected from seeing or responding to it.
What happened to "if you're not paying, you're the product"?
To register, you need to enter your phone number.
Even telegram now allows creating an account without a phone number, why is this still a requirement?
Thanks, but no thanks.
[downvote all you want, but we're complaining about facebook and others, while replacing them with a new, shiny social network, that has the same pitfalls, just because Gruber recommends it - we never learn]
App Store search is broken, they are doing the Google thing where they want you to buy ads so people find your app when you type its name in the search box.
Is what Zulip does. And it works great. Even for large orgs.