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XMPP works – 1 July 2020

xmpp.org

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Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#11

Post by justinsaccount »

foxfired wrote: post #2

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems? In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should u…

Probably around 2011 I was trying to push for XMPP at a .edu for internal chat (they was no current system at all).

Around that time the iPad was showing up everywhere and I found was that there were zero good iOS XMPP clients. Every single one we tried, I'd notice it was proxying the credentials through a 3rd party server to deal with the lack of background connection support and to handle the push notifications. This was a major security issue, and also meant it would have been unusable during an internet outage.

This sort of thing, combined with the lack of server side history was probably what killed it.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#12

Post by jayd16 »

GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at the time.

At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work like that?

I think XMPP just failed to cater to any audience. The Googles and Facebooks could roll their own and for everyone else it was too cumbersome. It's not as "easy" as running an email server and no one wants to do that either. It wasn't even agile enough to woo small communities with whiz-bang features.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#13

Post by Multicomp »

Can anyone point me to other RSS-able newsletters I should follow? Between This Week In Matrix, Sergey Tihon's F# Weekly, Pine64s updates on the Pinephone, and now this XMPP newsletter (which admittedly I thought was a Johnny-come-lately approach to showing that XMPP was cool like Matrix, see, we've got the newsletter stuff too! - but A: it's clear they have been doing this for a bit and B: I digress), I'm enjoying reading tech 'periodicals' and keeping up with what's new in my favorite technologies.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#15

Post by ReactiveJelly »

black_puppydog wrote: post #3
foxfired wrote: post #2

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems? In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should u…

facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned. I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on face…

Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other.

At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail.

[1] This part is the joke.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#16

Post by icedchai »

jayd16 wrote: post #12
GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at the time. At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work like that? I think X…

I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful.

On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#17

Post by im3w1l »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #15
black_puppydog wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned. I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on face…

Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail. [1] This part is the joke.

Even though it's widely recognized as impossible for individuals to self-host, at least there are many available providers, and any medium+ size organization can self-host. Things could be better but they could be worse too.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#18

Post by harlanji »

GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

I built Siashable with ExtJS and xmpp4js in 2008 against Openfire. I’ve run it at various times against Tigase and Prosody and it works, and even ran the XMPP lib I made for it in iOS JS Core recently, and it has its own everything down to DOM with namespace support in JS so works back to early IE versions. I’d say XMPP with BOSH works pretty good.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#19

Post by risyachka »

GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

League of Legends chat, WhatsApp and early versions of Facebook chat were build with XMPP and Ejabberd and they were able to handle massive loads with it.

Obviously for an internal company chat app this is not the best option as it will require some maintenance, and the app support is not great, though there are some good options now.

But for heavy chat load it is a great choice that will save you a ton of money, time and resources.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#20

Post by sacks2k »

rektide wrote: post #4
foxfired wrote: post #2

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems? In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should u…

"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?" Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient & the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.

"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it"

I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately.

I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past.

It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats.

Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.

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