COI – Chat Over IMAP • Hacker News Board

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#161

Post by calimac » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #47

lima wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode). Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database). It's great in theory but imp…

This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'har…

“Can kicking” the data retention? What’s the eta on your solution to stop logging user data?

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#162

Post by rafbuff » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #76

All it has to do really is to do some TCP magic so that the messages can flow peer-2-peer!?

Current thinking is that the IMAP servers connect directly, but via SMPT for message transfer, but without the store-and-forward, once they are trusted via a token exchange. May be blocked though in server deployments (ports).

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#163

Post by rafbuff » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #42

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #38

They will have a problem with greylisting mail.

Oh wait, they will not. I can not find any reference to a working client implementation on their website. Are they expecting others to write implementations?

And yes, we want to open the chat ecosystem to many many cool clients made by you all for every taste and use case. Beyond the obvious WhatsAppySnappyChattySlacky varieties, if you think it through, you can even envision Twitter and Facebook-like clients. Sounds crazy but we cannot imagine why not. Plus normal Email clients can be seriously pimped.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#164

Post by _trampeltier » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

I was wondering a long time, why we don't have chats with user@domain like email or mastodon.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#165

Post by petre » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

zinid wrote: post #104

Arathorn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) In terms of disingenuousness - i'd argue that the definition of disingenuous is accusing us of reinventing the wheel rather than acknowledging that Matrix is an entirely different type of technology to IRC or XMPP. It's more similar to NNTP or Git than either IRC or XMPP. For better or worse, trying to solve existing…

> i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) Recognized by whom? The XSF has standardized their core in IETF. Is there something similar for Matrix.org Foundation? > trying to solve existing problems using new approaches is how things evolve. What new approaches? You're just recreating federated IM network using different wire format. How on earth is it innova…

Except XMPP already has several mature client and server implementations since it was around for longer.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#166

Post by cvwright » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

ppjet6 wrote: post #88

Arathorn wrote: post #29

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this t…

Jeremie Miller, 1999: > "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems(ICQ, AIM, etc). Matthew Hodgson, 2019: > I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince eve…

If everyone shared your (lack of) optimism, then we'd still be stuck with:

* Wonky unwieldy hypertext systems instead of the WWW

* The Nomad instead of the iPod

* The Blackberry instead of the iPhone

* GNU Hurd instead of Linux

* Geocities instead of Facebook (-- OK maybe that one's a wash :-)

The point is, sometimes it's worth trying again until you can make it work.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#167

Post by victorqhong » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

Seems to me that XMPP already covers all these use cases of COI? Both XMPP and email use essentially the same addressing format but XMPP uses XML formatted messages whereas email uses HTML formatted messages (it's worth noting that XMPP used to support HTML messages).

So you could "send an email" in XMPP just by composing a message and sending it to what amounts to an email address (technically the bare JID). The XMPP client would just need to close the chat window after sending the message to make it seem like typical email experience.

XMPP also has the advantage that it was designed with the IM and multi-user chat use cases in mind (e.g. chat state notifications, message corrections, moderated/members-only chatrooms, etc.) but also can support email use cases.

I think it's easier just to set up your XMPP server to handle IMAP authentication.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#168

Post by billfruit » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

I remember Microsoft having a chat service build on top of email 2 or 3 years ago, it was called "Send". Whatever happened to it..

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#169

Post by throwaway47556 » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

I work for a large consumer facing mail provider. Imap is easily 60% of our cost because it's a very inefficient protocol. Also, we can't put ads in 3rd party imap clients. So we make zero revenue from them. COI will exacerbate the problem. I wonder how we will solve this problem.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#170

Post by throwanem » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

Derek_MK wrote: post #152

repler wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all email is is two people sending telegraphs really quickly to each other....

I mean metaphorically sure, but in this case it's literally using the exact same system; it's just the clients are changed to look like a chat app instead of an email app. This is more like if two people were sending telegraphs over actual telegraph lines, with morse code and everything, then at the end they type it up into a Word document and say "It's email!"

And? What makes "chat" is synchrony and to a certain extent UI, not transport protocol.