11–20 of 138 posts
I really miss the days of being able to use pidgin to talk to everyone
Now I have to use different apps for Signal, Element, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, ...
I think the big issue with XMPP are the clients. Element is so much better that it's hard not to recommend Matrix to people despite its bloat and metadata leakage problems. JMP/Snikket for tying a normal phone number to your XMPP @ are really convenient, but the clients remain a problem. Plus, SIP dialers are not supported on IOS afaik. I am really surprised there isn't a venture backed company pushing XMPP forward.…
There are a number of companies in the ecosystem. Most have chosen not to pursue VC money in order to keep things going much longer. While a venture backed company can have success, most flame out eventually in my observation.
XMPP lost because the spec is overcomplicated and hard to implement. As a result, good clients never materialized and innovation was really hard to do. Everything in this article is an offshoot of the overcomplicated spec.
Is there a “modern” equivalent to XMPP? How does it compare to the matrix protocol?
We evaluated some options at work for self-hosted chat about a decade ago. XMPP lost out due to the lack of a good iPhone client. Not sure if things are any better now.
XMPP lost because the spec is overcomplicated and hard to implement. As a result, good clients never materialized and innovation was really hard to do. Everything in this article is an offshoot of the overcomplicated spec.
Is there a “modern” equivalent to XMPP? How does it compare to the matrix protocol?
Yes, it's called "XMPP".
XMPP lost because the spec is overcomplicated and hard to implement. As a result, good clients never materialized and innovation was really hard to do. Everything in this article is an offshoot of the overcomplicated spec.
XMPP lost because the spec is overcomplicated and hard to implement. As a result, good clients never materialized and innovation was really hard to do. Everything in this article is an offshoot of the overcomplicated spec.
One of those is not like the others...
The contortions they had to do to cram server-based federated instant messaging into the context of the SIP protocol stack by sheer force are something to behold.
I can only assume this is entirely by design – the more needless complexity, the more opportunity to patent things (or at least keep competitors out): As far as I understand it, practically all carriers are just outsourcing the entire thing to Google.
Refusal to do a flag day to implement ACK ultimately resulted in board dissolution, shitty unreliable protocol with zombie presences and lost messages. Eventually, the community just walked away, to IM systems that actually work somewhat reliably. This is how XMPP fell into irrelevance.
"Flag days" in a decentralized network have to be used with caution. Ask whether it's better to communicate without a specific feature, or whether it's better to split the network into fragments which are unable to communicate with each other. The former is almost always preferable, however we used the "flag day" approach for mandatory server-to-server TLS, for example (which actually isolated Google Talk from the main network).
As for acks, those were first defined in 2004, and have generally been implemented since the beginning in clients that need it (e.g. mobile clients, and every client since WiFi and laptops became ubiquitous).
I can think of a number of reasons that XMPP is often overlooked when it comes to modern IM, but this is a weirdly specific thing to pick out, especially when I can hardly remember a time it wasn't implemented everywhere.