Writing a blatant Telegram clone using Qt, QML and Rust. And C++

> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.

Easy: Be at the right spot in the right time and be lucky to be noticed.

WhatsApp had one smart idea: tying accounts to phone number, which solved detectability, while SMS where expensive in many regions. When ICQ/AIM still missed the mobile market and before Apple made iMessage.

Easy to replicate, as we can see with Facebook messenger or Google's different attempts, who invested quite a few resources into that.

I tried Jami for a bit with a friend. For both me and my friend, Jami was very unreliable about delivering notifications about new messages. So my friend would send me a message but because I didn’t get any notification about the message it would go days before I opened the app and saw that he had said something, and I’d respond to it and it would be days before he would happen to open the app again because he also didn’t get any notification.

> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.

I was at WhatsApp from 2014 - 2019. Growing a large userbase from scratch doesn't happen by any one factor. You have to do a lot of things well. (and probably get lucky)

a) potential users need a compelling reason to join. Messaging at data rates was significant, but not in the US were many people had large messaging allowances. Works better than SMS/MMS was compelling for some.

b) existing users need to be satisfied enough to stay: service has to work consistently, client has to work, etc.

c) signup flow needs to work well. Doesn't matter if people want to use the app if they can't. You need to help users understand their phone number (or other identification). You need multiple methods of verification, because SMS doesn't always work. Giving someone a several digit code over the phone is a cognitive task for the user, and it's harder with disjointed speech generation, so you need to spend some time on that too. You need multiple providers because if you can't get verification codes to users, some of those people will give up and never come back. Since you have multiple providers, you need to figure out how to pick one based on current conditions which you also need to figure out how to track. Also --- you need some money, sending all these codes gets expensive. Phone numbers as ids is a blessing because "everyone has one" and you can use the system address book for contacts, but verification costs add up; usernames or email as id make contact discovery messy and a surprising amount of people in the developing world don't have an email address or don't know what it is.

d) users get new phones, a lot, you need to make it easy to move their account. Or they will likely drop your service when they get a new phone.

e) you need to be prepared for and handle large events. If some big news happens, people will want to talk about it. If some similar service has an outage, you will get more traffic --- if you also fall over, that's a lost opportunity.

f) things need to work well on the devices people actually have. Which might not be the ones you would prefer to use. Worldwide, most people don't have flagship phones. If you want a large number of users, having good experiences only on recent flagships is self limiting. Working well (or at least better than alternatives) on low end and older devices is a path towards addressing users that others miss.

There's probably more. Most of these require sustained consistent effort to deliver. It's not a one time thing. And it's not quick. Sustained consistent effort is easy enough as a one product start-up, but it's very hard as a big-corp.

Userbase can be a positive feedback loop: once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join ... and having no one to talk to is a reason to leave. There's not really a way to jump start it, unless you've already got a large user base somewhere else that you can use to seed your service.

does Jami store messages server side like Telegram to enable access to messages everywhere?

"Telegram: Best UI"

https://i.imgur.com/YDaP5EH.gif

> Telegram: Best UI

Hard no. Have you tried activating encryption in personal chats?

Jetbrains CLion is great for non-Qt C++, albeit paid. It helped me deliver a bank-exchange-grade connector in a tight schedule with very little knowledge of C (at that time). Mostly with static checking, compiling, cmake etc.

I agree Qt Creator is really good, and VSCode with the Microsoft C++ extension is probably not quite as good.

However with the Clangd extension it is much much better. Even better than Qt Creator. 100% accurate C++ code intelligence, really really fast error squigglies. Honestly I was kind of surprised it's even possible to get it that good.

It's not quite on the level of Dart (which is basically instant and perfect), but I'd say it's on the same level as Rust at least in terms of responsiveness and reliability.

I found QML to be a terrible language for making GUIs. I really tried with it. But it just felt so hacky and unfinished. A couple of examples (from like 10 years ago so forgive me if I got some of the details a bit wrong):

1. Child components can magically refer to variables in their parents. This is basic encapsulation 101. The only other language I know of that allows that is SystemVerilog and that's from an era where people didn't know better (especially hardware guys).

2. You can create custom widgets... but they can't display text! There's a class called something like QmlSceneGraphTextNode that is the way that all the provided widgets display text but it's private. I guess they might have fixed this eventually but it stayed private for the ~5 years I tried to use it. They wanted me to just use Label widgets in QML land which sucks.

It also felt like there was a pretty huge impedance mismatch between QML and C++ due to its use of Javascript. E.g. stuff like using 64-bit integers. That reminds me:

3. It uses Javascript.

4. I never found a good way to use dialogs. They seem to push you towards having all possible dialogs exist all the time and just showing and hiding them, which is kind of crazy.

I don't think the idea of a GUI DSL is fundamentally bad, but QML is certainly a pretty miserable implementation. Hopefully the Slint guys have learned all of these lessons.

Yeah I found the same thing. The issue turned out to be that something in my `.bashrc` was appending to `PATH` (or some other env var). Because my `cargo build` commands that were running in one more level of shell than Rust-analyzer, it had different env vars and therefore a different cache key.

Once you fix it so that Rust-analyzer sees the same env vars as your shell then the issue goes away. It's kind of annoyingly hard to debug though.

I think a self-hosting option for IM that's better than XMPP could be nice... that said, not sure if something like torrent would be good. I gave a lot of thought to something similar for emails, and the biggest issue came down to, it would be difficult to do something anonymous, distributed, and resistant to flooding/poison pill attacks.

Torrents themselves work against this, because you have known hash values as part of seeding... with email and messaging, you wouldn't have one-off advanced knowledge, and if anyone can send anyone a message, you'd be open to a flood of messages from what seems to be randos. There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse.

A federated system that's otherwise tethered to a domain/email or similar would at least allow for self-management and/or block listing techniques to work better in practice.

There were some rather forgotten nowadays projects like Tox, Briar, Ricochet that should fit what you describe