Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned.

Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/

This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs.

This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol.

Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location.

The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS).

I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone.

I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)

> Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services

While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them.

Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.

Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty.

Some of us do care.

Nice, I did not know. Really

Where is the source code?

Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/