The context of the discussion ("Easy XMPP") is an attempt to fix the UX of XMPP clients, which starts with a set of small steps documented in the pages linked from https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Easy_XMPP
Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#12I think there is still place for an end to end encrypted Jabber app with an option to self host the server. This would avoid the single point of failure issue that Signal has (Signal servers being blocked in certain countries).
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#13I have 0 friends using signal so it's hard to give it a try: Did they fix the multiple devices end-to-end problem? Can I continue a conversation from my smartphone on my desktop? ( should be possible by mirroring the conversations and having 2 keys). This was what killed OTR for me (and that it fails on unstable mobile connections, and the setup).
I'm not sure when the last time you tried it was, but that feature has been working since I first started using it, well over a year ago.
It _could_ be better in that the "desktop" client is just a Chrome app. Personally, I would find even a standalone Electron-based app to be a better choice UI-wise.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#14I think the issue with XMPP is the myriad of XEPs (XMPP extensions) which are optional, causing excessive fragmentation. Some clients are excellent, like conversations.im. The problem is accidental complexity. Perhaps a solution would be to have a meta XEP that aggregates a few basic XEPs and defines a minimum common denominator.
There are attempts at creating an XMPP compliance suite[0], but the biggest problem is actually a lack of volunteers / money to improve the clients and servers. Conversations is driven by one full time developer, most other applications are hobby projects.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#15It would (will..?) be a crying shame to see XMPP grind to a halt - but I suspect, sadly, that the honest answer to the question is "not one heck of a lot really". I don't know if it got started too early, or moved too slowly, or what - but in the end, it missed its boat.
XMPP is great for back-end applications and internal messaging for businesses, and is not going away, the issue is the "consumer space" where every big vendor has its own XMPP like protocol but slightly broken to be incompatible with generic clients.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#16Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#17competition is healthy
Except when you've got so many clients and so many servers that the typical user gives up instead
Email exists.
When Slack is bought by Google and merged with Hangouts, and WhatsApp changes over to a new all-messages-delivered-by-the-NSA protocol, email will still exist.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#18I think the issue with XMPP is the myriad of XEPs (XMPP extensions) which are optional, causing excessive fragmentation. Some clients are excellent, like conversations.im. The problem is accidental complexity. Perhaps a solution would be to have a meta XEP that aggregates a few basic XEPs and defines a minimum common denominator.
Also, most people are introduced to XMPP in ways that don't let group chats work very well, so they think that's an XMPP problem, not the service's.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#19I think the issue with XMPP is the myriad of XEPs (XMPP extensions) which are optional, causing excessive fragmentation. Some clients are excellent, like conversations.im. The problem is accidental complexity. Perhaps a solution would be to have a meta XEP that aggregates a few basic XEPs and defines a minimum common denominator.
There are attempts at creating an XMPP compliance suite[0], but the biggest problem is actually a lack of volunteers / money to improve the clients and servers. Conversations is driven by one full time developer, most other applications are hobby projects. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0375.html
It was a real sad day when Facebook and Google decided that proprietary was the way to go...
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#20I have 0 friends using signal so it's hard to give it a try: Did they fix the multiple devices end-to-end problem? Can I continue a conversation from my smartphone on my desktop? ( should be possible by mirroring the conversations and having 2 keys). This was what killed OTR for me (and that it fails on unstable mobile connections, and the setup).
Yes, you can carry the conversation from phone to several desktop platforms. It uses a Chrome extension to achieve that. You can't have two phones synchronizing yet, though.
Yes, you can't have two phones, or a phone or a tablet, or two computers synchronizing. It also won't synchronize SMS conversations, it'll hijack the SMS datastore if you want to use the seamless mode and do a bunch of other annoying stuff :/