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> It's a chat app that works very well even on the crappiest connections

Does it? I routinely use Telegram, Line and Messenger. Messenger is without contest the one that gives the most trouble.

I've been using chat apps at least since ICQ (1996) and sometimes I feel the user experience has declined.

That being said, I'm sure that a lot of progress have been made and that there's a lot going on behind Messenger in terms of security and scalability. I'd be curious to know what's hidden between the millions LOC.




> I've been using chat apps at least since ICQ (1996) and sometimes I feel the user experience has declined.

You never used ICQ over a spotty 3G connection, though, did you?


I have, with an OpenVPN-over-UDP tunnel as a workaround. If they included Wireguard (or better yet, just used encrypted UDP) it would still be smaller (and probably more reliable).


Introduce random dropouts, crazy jitter and random IP switches and you get the emulation of what a crappy network looks like.


I don't know if this is what you were referring to, but for everyone else: this is actually super easy to add with Wireguard because Wireguard just uses Linux networking you can do things like:

  $ tc qdisc change dev eth0 root netem loss 0.3% 25%
(Lose 0.3% packets on average, but each packet is 25% correlated with the last packet loss, to produce bursts.)

  $ tc qdisc change dev eth0 root netem delay 100ms 20ms distribution normal
(Add mu=100ms, sigma=20ms normally distributed latency.)


Not a lot of 3G coverage back in 1996, honestly.


In my experience in places where connectivity sucks (barely able to get data handoffs between stations, sticky wifi, etc) messenger kicks ass while the other applications hick-up big time.




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