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I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff. It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere. EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.
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I thought Android is one of the best-supported platforms with conversations.im?
Yes, you're correct; but I found the UI too ugly and at that point I was already too frustrated. It's probably me, but I had put already too much time on something that shouldn't be an issue.
These would be my concerns about potential differences between Signal and an 'Easy XMPP' client; would someone who knows Signal say whether these are accurate?: * Signal users are not anonymous; Signal requires users' phone numbers. * Signal is centralized. Is there a way to run your own Signal server? * Signal uses Google Chrome on the desktop (and Android?) and Google Play Services (or some part of them) on Android…
I think Google is only used to send empty notifications to android and chrome devices, right? IOS too, maybe? Not that this nullifies your point about Google. There's just not much for them to collect if what I asked is correct.
Around the mid-2000s, IM networks started getting tired of constantly changing their protocols to thwart third-party reverse engineering efforts like Microsoft logging into AIM, libpurple (Pidgin), or Trillian. But then Google Talk appeared [1] in 2006 inside the coveted invite-only Gmail, supporting XMPP, and significantly raised the bar.
So interoperability became a tool to maintain market share. The underdogs WLM and Yahoo started seamless interop [1] in July 2006, while Google Talk and AIM started a limited interop [1] in 2007. AIM briefly dabbled with XMPP it in 2008 [2] (great source -- see comments for AIM's response).
In the meantime, Facebook opened up for everyone, introduced Chat and rapidly lured away the myspace/AIM generation, becoming a major player in chat. Facebook introduced XMPP in February 2010 [3] but discontinued it [4] in 2015 after having deprecated it the year prior. This neatly coincided with their announcement to monetize the Messenger ecosystem, in ways that require a captive client [5].
Other vendors are similarly pursuing monetization within the client -- Snapchat and Kik as a content portal [6][7][8][9], Google as a context-aware assistant, Microsoft is lost at sea, Whatsapp as a Facebook data mining scheme, the Asian apps as a combination of all other techniques and microtranactions -- when anyone can bring a third-party client, their monetization strategy suffers. This makes XMPP's deployment future exceedingly bleak, perhaps restricted solely to corporate deployments.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080120143857/http://florianjen... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20100318030410/http://developers.... [4] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat [5] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/03/25/introdu... [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11935956#11941090 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000854#12002773 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12206846#12207459 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12272973#12273447
The technical merits and drawbacks of XMPP aside, deployment only works if there's an appetite from deployers. For high-visibility consumer chat that average people use, this appetite has vanished. Around the mid-2000s, IM networks started getting tired of constantly changing their protocols to thwart third-party reverse engineering efforts like Microsoft logging into AIM, libpurple (Pidgin), or Trillian. But then Go…
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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.
Why can't I run my own signal server? Why doesn't the client support this?
We need something like Signal that that isn't under the control of a single party.
I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff. It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere. EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.
Why is there a lack of screenshots of the clients on the Riot.im website? sigh
I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff. It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere. EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.