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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

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Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#131

Post by icebraining »

notyourwork wrote: post #128
a3_nm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on XMPP somewhere).

I don't have experience with xmpp protocol but how is it better than an http or soap for example?

HTTP and SOAP are generic, XMPP provides semantics for specific chat/IM related concepts like users, presence, user-to-user messages, etc.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#132

Post by daveid »

pmlnr wrote: post #52

"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter wh…

Mastodon is built on open web protocols. Currently that's OStatus, coming forward we're adapting ActivityPub (which is probably what you meant? ActivityFeeds is not a real thing as far as I can see)

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#133

Post by edhelas »

alexmat wrote: post #70
gramakri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

Did you had a look at Movim ? https://movim.eu/

It offers a full social network solution (publication, comments, replies, contacts…) and modern IM (chatrooms, stickers, history management, synchronisation between devices). All in real-time, multi-platforms and fully built on XMPP :)

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#135

Post by TomMarius »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #124
TomMarius wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't lose anything (assuming your whole team uses the same bouncer, which is a good solution, IMO), logs will remain saved on the disk drive, but people will be unable to connect. Personally I have a bouncer running on a VPS since 2008 with 100% uptime so far, costs me $3/month and is used by 10 people.

If my bouncer goes down, I don't have the history for the period for which it was down. Congrats on 100% uptime, but that's not the numbers one should plan by.

If the bouncer goes down and your team uses only the bouncer, someone fixes the problem before new history is made, and nothing is lost. Fixing the problem means rebooting the machine, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with a simple IRC bouncer.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#136

Post by SamWhited »

notyourwork wrote: post #128
a3_nm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on XMPP somewhere).

I don't have experience with xmpp protocol but how is it better than an http or soap for example?

XMPP Core is a protocol at (roughly) the same level as HTTP: it provides basic semantics for sending and getting data, and you can build your own application level protocols on top of it. XMPP IM is an application level protocol built on top of it that does something specific (instant messaging). It could have been built on HTTP as well, but they were designed to work well together.

If we're comparing XMPP core to HTTP, the difference is that XMPP core is async and stateful (like instant messaging sessions) and HTTP is synchronous and stateless (great for fetching documents).

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#137

Post by SamWhited »

quanticle wrote: post #96
falcolas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies giving up on open standards in favor of their own walled gardens does not really provide a meaningful commentary on the open standards themselves. XMPP itself is a bit of a mess, but it's a standard with a lot of adoption, which has its own value.

A lot of adoption? How many users does XMPP have? I'm glad that XMPP is open, but as a standard, it's useless to me if none of my friends are using services that support it.

I don't know how one could get a good estimate of this, but it is still very widely used. Whatsapp (with custom compression and federation disabled), HipChat Server, Cisco Jabber, Android push notifications, Google Cloud Print communications, etc. are all XMPP. But yes, for personal instant messaging Google and Facebook were the big players and they are no longer on it (at least as an interface to their clients)

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#138

Post by mi100hael »

Flimm wrote: post #118
Spivak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want your email to look the same on all clients text/plain is the way to go.

That's not true. Plain text is usually hard wrapped with newlines, which leads to awful experiences on small screens.

You can send plain text encoding with format=flowed to avoid the hard wrap. Personally I prefer 80 chars, though. Still looks fine in landscape mode on any phone.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#139

Post by larma »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #94
erikpukinskis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to hear people saying all the time "well, the correct way to handle [messaging problem X] is to use XMPP" but more recently people seem to talk of it like a dead man walking. Is it really so bad? Is there anything on the horizon that could replace email as an open messaging protocol? I guess kilobyte-sized text snippets are probably a pretty good fit for a blockchain-based trustless messaging service. A millio…

I've never implemented it, but from a user standpoint, there aren't any widely-available services that people seem to use. gchat appears to be shutting their endpoints down. Facebook shut theirs down in 2014. People got familiar with email because their ISP/employer provided them with an email address. Eventually it became a thing on it's own. Chat was never like that. There was always one service you used, and all y…

Just to be precise: Google and Facebook did not shut down their xmpp servers, they just disabled the ability to connect to them via xmpp clients, to make sure everyone uses their web clients, so they don't loose any data they could've collected otherwise...

The original Google Talk ifnrastructure is still up and running and clients can connect to it using a protocol derived from XMPP (basically a subset XMPP converted to protobuf) and use it to message devices (Android uses it push messaging, but technically you can also send messages directly between devices). It's not directly used for text messaging though.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#140

Post by ryandrake »

pinwale wrote: post #129
huhweirdyhat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters? Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years. In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likel…

In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email. One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.

As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?
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