Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

adele.pages.casa

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 138 posts

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#111

Post by aine »

ptman wrote: post #105
roflmaostc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha yeah. Within Pidgin I used ICQ, XMPP (over my own VPS), Skype, Facebook messenger, ... Now I have to use different apps for Signal, Element, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, ...

Beeper (built on matrix) has convenient bridges to lots of services. You can use the hosted service or self-host ( https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager ) or you can host plain matrix using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

"plain matrix" sounds a bit wrong - we put great effort into maintaining numerous of components of the playbook, including bridges, so it has a lot to offer. Alternatively, you can just get a managed server on https://etke.cc

Disclaimer: I'm Aine of etke.cc, and MDAD is our project

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#112

Post by rw_grim »

arcbyte wrote: post #6

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.

You should look at the matrix specs, include the new matrix 2 stuff...

My point is, this argument is a bad one as it expects people to get the protocols right on the first try and that's never going to happen.

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#113

Post by solarkraft »

XMPP could’ve been great, I‘ve used it and the implementations have worked quite well.

There have been revival/popularization attempts, but nowadays traction seems to be with Matrix.

Unfortunately that spec also has big issues and the ecosystem is still struggling with usability (though it has improved a lot recently) and implementations.

It’s an unfortunate situation in a time in which an open communication standard is more important than ever.

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#114

Post by rw_grim »

mindcrime wrote: post #15
pixelatedindex wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a “modern” equivalent to XMPP? How does it compare to the matrix protocol?

> Is there a “modern” equivalent to XMPP? Yes, it's called "XMPP".

more specifically https://docs.modernxmpp.org/

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#115

Post by rw_grim »

xorcist wrote: post #69
arcbyte wrote: post #6

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.

Compared to what? Compared to IRC, yes, but it's not really comparable. The closest comparison is probably Matrix and that is a pretty complex protocol too.

You might be surprised how modern irc is nowadays... https://ircv3.net/

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#116

Post by upofadown »

PokemonNoGo wrote: post #97
upofadown wrote: post #41

The SMS gateway provided by jmp.chat has made XMPP fairly awesome for me. I have an XMPP client on all my devices and SMS contacts are just more contacts in my roster.

> SMS contacts are just more contacts in my roster Sorry for the question but i don't really understand what this means?

A SMS contact is just a regular XMPP address. They show up looking like this:

    +15555555555@cheogram.com
You would normally immediately add a nickname.

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#117

Post by snvzz »

MattJ100 wrote: post #20
snvzz wrote: post #2

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.

I'm not sure what you mean. The XMPP Standards Foundation still has a Board, as that's required by the foundation's bylaws. "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 u…

>still has a Board

Of course it does. A different one.

>"Flag days" in a decentralized network have to be used with caution.

Yet sometimes they are necessary, even if they annoy people. Core issues need to be fixed.

>As for acks, those were first defined in 2004, and have generally been implemented since the beginning in clients that need it

I am not talking about read receipts or the like. I am talking about TCP connections assumed reliable. Protocol's messages sent, and assumed received. Not clients, but more seriously server to server. This is why zombie presences were widespread.

>I can think of a number of reasons that XMPP is often overlooked when it comes to modern IM

There really is but one. It was infamous for being seriously unreliable, and as people moved to actually reliable IM systems (majorly proprietary), they never looked back.

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#118

Post by WD-42 »

rw_grim wrote: post #109
WD-42 wrote: post #9

I really miss the days of being able to use pidgin to talk to everyone

We're still here and we're getting close to finally getting a pre alpha Pidgin 3 out the door. In the mean time check out https://pidgin.im/plugins for third party plugins that provide at least basic support most of the modern protocols.

I’ve see you stream pidgin 3 development on twitch. Keep up the good work!

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#119

Post by veqq »

WD-42 wrote: post #9

I really miss the days of being able to use pidgin to talk to everyone

Different applications also supported different feature sets. Keeping up with ever newer supersets also stretched many players’ resources too much: https://alexalejandre.com/programming/xmpp-open-messaging-st...

> A more rigid core standard, actively keeping up with new technology may have delivered XMPP’s federated dream. In reality, each sever supported a different feature set, while lacking common features every other chat app offered. As mobile technology transformed, XMPP stayed still. Pidgin worked on Google Talk, before an XEP brought (necessary) OIDC authentification and those 3rd-party clients couldn’t keep up.

Re: XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

#120

Post by SamWhited »

ValleZ wrote: post #95
SamWhited wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was this? It's had most of these things for quite a while, but I'd be curious specifically what was missing and when or if there are still gaps? To my knowledge it had most of these things before any other chat protocol was widespread and prior to the great silo-ing.

Awhile ago. XEP-0286 (mobile connection improvements) dated 2018-01-25. File sharing has many different XEPs and I have no idea which works, but I know that early XEPs usually didn't work because of NAT. XEP-0384 (encryption) dated 2022-01-18.

All of those are newer XEPs for things that existed long before those XEPs or those specific versions if the XEP were published. There may be specific issues (I do remember that p2p file sharing never worked unless you were a network engineer who could tame nat), but I'm skeptical that they were still an issue when other protocols came along. I could be wrong, of course.
Post reply on HN