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Message from Facebook: this could be war

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Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#61

Post by Mithaldu »

stingraycharles wrote: post #50
Morgawr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, th…

I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.

Incorrect. It is easy to get that via self-hosted services like znc.in or third-party services like: https://www.irccloud.com/

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#62

Post by sspiff »

golergka wrote: post #60
sspiff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the client. TextSecure is an open-source XMPP/Jabber client for Android which does end-to-end encryption (OTR?), and adds contacts based on your address book automatically. It also supports adding a new contact by phone number, and replaces the stock text messaging application, automatically upgrading text messages to OTR XMPP sessions if the other party is on the same network. It doesn't do federation…

No iOS version.

Yes there is, it's called Signal[1], by the same developers. It started out as two separate products, but you can use them to chat between iOS and Android.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id8...

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#63

Post by lmm »

upofadown wrote: post #41
lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time). I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends…

What is wrong with jabber group chat? You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

> What is wrong with jabber group chat?

The presumably protocol-level problems are that you can't "upgrade" a two-person conversation to a groupchat, and that a groupchat is an entity in its own right belonging to a particular server, which is something the user really shouldn't have to care about (and also causes reliability issues). And that there's no history.

Beyond that the user experience in every client I've used is terrible: open a dialogue to list available groupchats, manually join one, accept the notification, manually rejoin if you're disconnected. And then you tend to get notifications on every message, rather than just on messages that mention you; purely a client problem, but fundamentally if there are no good clients then it leads me to suspect there's a deeper problem.

Just compare with the groupchat experience in Slack or Skype or heck, AIM.

> You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

Send messages to all connected clients for the account, like virtually every other protocol does. And sync history between them. I can accept that that's hard without a centralized server, but it's vital.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#64

Post by ForHackernews »

xtrumanx wrote: post #55
Morgawr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, th…

Instant messaging was useful to non-tech users since the days before web 2.0. Don't you remember AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger?

ICQ forever!

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#65

Post by oddvar »

NoGravitas wrote: post #54
lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time). I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends…

Thanks for the link to matrix.org. I hadn't heard of it, and I wish them success. I don't think XMPP is awful, and I think the reasons for its failure have been political/social/cultural rather than technical, but if Matrix can get more traction, then more power to them.

Please come ask any questions on https://matrix.org/beta/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org -- or #matrix on freenode which is bridged to the same matrix "room"!

(disclaimer: I work on Matrix)

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#66

Post by upofadown »

lmm wrote: post #63
upofadown wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with jabber group chat? You don't like the jabber priority based method of dealing with multiple connections. What would be better?

> What is wrong with jabber group chat? The presumably protocol-level problems are that you can't "upgrade" a two-person conversation to a groupchat, and that a groupchat is an entity in its own right belonging to a particular server, which is something the user really shouldn't have to care about (and also causes reliability issues). And that there's no history. Beyond that the user experience in every client I've u…

My instance of Ejabber will send to all connected clients in the case where the priorities are identical.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#67

Post by oddvar »

antihero wrote: post #24
Morgawr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late? This is why I simply love IRC.

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in…

IRC is great, and I'm sure it could be great for non-geeks too! When we started working on Matrix (matrix.org) we based a lot of the messaging/chat side of things on the features we like (and the ones we miss!) from IRC, and now we have a bridge to our IRC channels which means you can chat to Matrix-users from irssi or whatever - or you can use the webbrowser or android/ios matrix client and still keep an eye on IRC.

Auto-backfill is really nice. And being able to send rich content is something we kind of take for granted these days.

(disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org)

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#68

Post by oddvar »

zimpenfish wrote: post #9
NoGravitas wrote: post #4

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol ( http://xmpp.org/ ). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations ( http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR ). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

I was going to say that Facebook Messenger does work with XMPP but double checking just now, it seems that was deprecated a year ago and will disappear at the end of next month. Huh. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

it's a real shame - both facebook and google tried to use XMPP but have since removed support.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#69

Post by onestone »

lmm wrote: post #30
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #5

Ugh. At least the world has managed to have "Email" as a standard, a medium, that is not controlled by any huge corporation's grubby claws. Why not with chat? What happened to this? Why is there a war for my data with these big companies, who do NOT have our best interests in mind, and never will? Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times…

Because Jabber is awful but too many people were so enthusiastic about its open-source nature that it blinded them to its faults (specifically poor groupchat and a bunch of bad choices about the behaviour when logging in from multiple clients at the same time). I don't think it's too late. I know the people working on http://matrix.org/ and I trust them to get the technology right. But as we know, popularity depends…

One more thing to dislike about XMPP/Jabber is that it's XML based. Writing products on top of it is unnecessarily verbose and complicated (also due to the bad choices you mentioned). A modern messaging protocol should use JSON.

Re: Message from Facebook: this could be war

#70

Post by corobo »

Mithaldu wrote: post #61
stingraycharles wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.

Incorrect. It is easy to get that via self-hosted services like znc.in or third-party services like: https://www.irccloud.com/

For the sake of argument I'm pretty sure stingraycharles meant built in, not another extra thing added on before you can use it
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