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Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

developers.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#171

Post by RaleyField »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #143
miduil wrote: post #62

I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then. So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure 'evilness'. They were probably fa…

I read through some github discussions in the tox github page, and I can't really shake the feeling that they don't know much security. Someone had a question about the protocol design and about how secure it was, and the dev just linked to NaCl and said "read the source here and you will see that tox is secure". It didn't really boost my confidence in their protocol design...

Can you link to the offending conversation?

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#172

Post by SEJeff »

amyjess wrote: post #160
automathematics wrote: post #30

Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is: 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her" 2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never…

What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore. Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them. Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the…

Sean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#173

Post by patcon »

hengheng wrote: post #66
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Sigh , yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to…

1339782 add me

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#174

Post by boomzilla »

rilita wrote: post #169

IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better. Why does a system with the following features not exist: 1. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol 2. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a server ) 3. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or th…

Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub-seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be responded later instead of NOW.

I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with emails.

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#175

Post by wtbob »

rakoo wrote: post #147
wtbob wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a happy medium between the readability of JSON and XML and the efficiency of ASN.1 and protobufs, take a look at canonical S-expressions[1]. There's an advanced representation, which looks like this: (message (header (sender "Billy Joe Bob") (sent "2015-03-26T12:02:00Z")) (body "Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!")). It's possible to encode any byte string using Base64 or hex. It's also possible…

> there is a _single_ canonical encoding for any datum: the messages above would be (7:message(6:header(6:sender13:Billy Joe Bob)(4:sent20:2015-03-26T12:02:00Z))(4:body35:Hey guys! Let's meet up for lunch!)) This reminds me a lot of bencode, with the advantage for bencode that it doesn't need any fiddling for non-printable characters: no more base64, no more hex.

The base64 & hex stuff is only used for the advanced, human-readable bits; on the wire it's just straight length-encoding and byte strings.

I'd say that bencode's advantage is a built-in standard for integer encoding (with canonical S-expressions one must decide between ASCII decimals or little/big-endian bit strings), and a clearer standard for a dictionary/map/hash (a canonical S-expression would probably use an alist-like structure like (map (foo bar) (baz quux)), but one could also go with (map foo bar baz quux), (map (foo bar baz quux)) or some other encoding.

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#176

Post by legulere »

smrtinsert wrote: post #159
automathematics wrote: post #30

Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is: 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her" 2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never…

Why IRC isn't the foundation for all chat I still don't know. I assume a lot of the typical workflow (logging in, choosing a nick) can be automated for users who don't care to know what chat protocol they are using.

Because it fails to satisfy so many modern demands. It doesn't even understand user names that aren't a subset of ASCII. Most of the commands aren't really standardized. It doesn't support end-to-end encryption (which today even WhatsApp is using). It requires you to be always connected instead of using push notification systems which are way better for the battery of mobile devices.

Probably the only reason the protocol is still around is that it's popular among a certain group. IRC is so different from what you would want from a modern chat system that it doesn't make much sense to build upon it.

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#177

Post by rilita »

boomzilla wrote: post #174
rilita wrote: post #169

IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better. Why does a system with the following features not exist: 1. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol 2. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a server ) 3. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or th…

Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub-seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be responded later instead of NOW. I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with emails.

Email fails in the following ways:

1. Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another.

5. The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the message itself

7. Large file transfer via email is horrible and extremely limited

8. No random chat support

9. No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat )

10. Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires getting and using a font that supports the codepoints )

11. No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is used by all people using email )

12. No real time messaging support. Inherent in the discussion is that chat software is insant, not based on server polling.

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#178

Post by julionc »

runn1ng wrote: post #158
vitno wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty. Some of us do care.

Nice, I did not know. Really Where is the source code?

The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html

Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#179

Post by detaro »

miduil wrote: post #62

I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then. So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure 'evilness'. They were probably fa…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036550

Read through this (with showdead on) for a bunch of links about tox and the pro/contra tox trolling that happened...

Re: Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away

#180

Post by fencepost »

nostrademons wrote: post #48
automathematics wrote: post #30

Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is: 1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her" 2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never…

This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature. I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or s…

My wife and I have gone back to emailing each other (from our phones) because we have periodic issues with massively delayed text messages (e.g. ~7PM "ETA?", reply "30 minutes", delivery of that reply ~1:30AM). Some of that's likely due to flakiness of her (old, but has a keyboard!) phone, but regardless of that email moves right through.
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