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Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

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Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#181

Post by Arathorn »

Perceptes wrote: post #170
cpach wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie Marlinspike recently published an interesting essay that adressed this question. ”XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a ’living standard.’ Despite its capacity for protocol ’extensions,’ however, it's undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can't realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so exte…

I am hoping the Matrix team will write a blog post about their viewpoint on Moxie's post, given that they are out to do something Moxie doesn't believe can succeed. I'm also curious to hear how they respond to the specific section you quoted: how is Matrix going to avoid the same fate XMPP suffered here?

We haven't had a chance to write a formal response yet; too busy getting Matrix out of beta. I responded at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669681 though.

A quick specific answer w.r.t. XMPP is that Matrix aims for a very coarser granularity of modularity, published as a single consistent spec, and mandates feature profiles to determine which modules should get used where. In other words, there is only one official set of endpoints specified for Matrix for a given use case (e.g. mobile IM+VoIP). So it ends up being under tighter control (whilst still very much taking proposals and PRs from the overall community), and is easier to swap out the higher level layers to rapidly evolve functionality - rather than suffering the proliferation of XEPs which is XMPP's double-edged sword.

This is always going to move slower than a centralised service, but we think the freedom of being able to select your clients/servers/services is well worth that cost in agility - and does not have to compromise privacy if engineered correctly.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#182

Post by Perceptes »

calanya wrote: post #171
Perceptes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somehow didn't process the "it's a smartphone part" and completely misunderstood his question as a result. I'll edit my original reply to correct that. Edit: Apparently I can't edit it anymore. :{

That's fine. I am really interested in the possibility of running a 'homeserver' directly on a phone. Do you think that would be possible?

Yes, it is possible. Ultimately, a homeserver is just a program that implements the client-server, and optionally the federation, APIs. The only feature-complete homeserver right now is Synapse, which is written in Python, and as of this moment has performance issues even running on a server, so it's not realistic that it could be modified to run on a phone. My homeserver Ruma is written in Rust, which is a systems language that actually is suited for mobile and embedded systems development, although I am currently not targeting that use case, nor is Ruma mature enough to be practically useful yet. If you're interested in the possibility of developing your own homeserver implementation specifically targeting your use case, you should take a look through the Matrix specification documents: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#183

Post by Freak_NL »

mike_hearn wrote: post #142
inopinatus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Featur…

> […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number […]

To me this translates to:

“Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that john.doe@gmail.com is the same person as feetfetish33 so we can better quantify you for targeted advertising.”

I am willing to entertain the notion that federation is not a solution, but seeing how you now either place yourself in this panopticon or you don't and 'miss out' on things makes me feel that we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people.

For all its warts and issues, email is still effectively federated, and will stay like that for quite a while due to the needs of many (not all, I certainly grant you that) businesses and local, regional, and national governments to control their own email infrastructure (mainly due to legislation and control).

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#184

Post by jsnell »

pdkl95 wrote: post #82
zardeh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait are you saying that XMPP was forced out (solely) by Google, and that Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" market? Not to mention that XMPP is a standard, not a competitor. This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.

> (solely) by Google I didn't say anything about other players in the "chat" market. > Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" No, the have dominance in the email market (I mentioned gmail). They used the position of power in the email market to limit XMPP and support their new Hangouts service. Just like Microsoft used to do, Google broke their support of the protocol. While most of the protocol sti…

In the timeframe you're talking of, Gmail was a distant third in webmail and even further down the list if you considered all email clients. I don't know where the threshold of "dominance" is, but I refuse to believe it's at 5% market share.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#185

Post by drdaeman »

nostrademons wrote: post #47
Frompo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp? Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...

People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. Since a critical feature of a messaging app is "my friends are on it", that gave MSN/FB/AIM a huge advantage over GChat, and had they not turned off XMPP integration, they would have bled off users until it was only used by small pockets of people, all of whom were on GChat (eg. Googlers).

> People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN.

How this had worked?

I mean, in XMPP both parties need a JID, so MSN users must have had theirs.

Had MSN had generated random non-discoverable JIDs for their users, blocked any incoming messages unless there were prior outgoing communications, made GChat interop opt-in or what?

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#186

Post by Freak_NL »

StavrosK wrote: post #150
Freak_NL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no qualms about OpenID Connect itself — it is a sound standard, using JSON Web Tokens is a particularly nice feature — but I dislike encouraging users to identify themselves for every service they use with Facebook or Google accounts. Way too much information about your digital life centralised with a single commercial party. I'd much rather see the use of password managers become more common, or even better,…

OpenID Connect supports discoverability, which enables a protocol like Mozilla Persona to work over it. That's exactly what some others and I are working on, hopefully we will make some headway and greatly increase the usability of authentication again.

Sounds like a good initiative, be sure to post on HN when you reach significant milestones.

What I worry about with OpenID Connect on the open internet (as opposed to OpenID Connect used in a corporate setting, or to provide single sign-on solutions for specific partnered services) is how it almost always results in a service asking you to use Google or Facebook to authenticate, with huge coloured buttons, followed by a tiny de-emphasized grey link where you can sign up using email and a password.

Is this something we can prevent?

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#187

Post by XorNot »

amelius wrote: post #156
Perceptes wrote: post #53

Just about every week now there is a top story on HN about the disastrous state of interoperable messaging in the digital world. Every time it comes up, I implore people to look into Matrix ( https://matrix.org ), a system with an open specification that checks all the boxes in terms of features (not quite end-to-end encryption yet, but it's being worked on) and is not controlled by a company. I really hope to see it…

Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?

Jabber doesn't do offline messaging well at all, nor push particularly well (not out of the box, so to speak).

The "standard library" of messaging has expanded a lot lately.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#188

Post by Arathorn »

inputmice wrote: post #123

Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations ( https://Conversations.im ) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…

inputmice: I hear your Conversations app is really nice, and it's great to see XMPP is evolving well. Rather than being defensive about XMPP and badmouthing matrix, perhaps we can just bridge both ecosystems and both sides and clients benefit from wider reach? Especially when some tech like interoperable E2E ratchet implementations is of direct use for both ecosystems.

The two protocols have entirely different designs and philosophies and do different things. It's like claiming that NNTP competes with SMTP because you can uses them both to hold conversations. Please can we both just get along? :)

In terms of matrix's usability: i'd say it's been very usable for the last 6 months or so - and given the size and activity visible to the matrix.org homeserver, others seem to concur.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#189

Post by drdaeman »

y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #151
inputmice wrote: post #123

Before you dismiss XMPP and seek for alternatives that need at least another 5-10 years to be actually usable (looking at you [matrix]) you might want to take a look at how far XMPP has come in the last 2-3 years. The Android client Conversations ( https://Conversations.im ) is a prime example on what can be achieved with XMPP today. In band images, emojis, End-to-end encryption, group chats…

conversations is really nice. thanks for making it. one problem i have with it, that gchat solves really well, is how it behaves when you have a desktop client and conversations open at the same time. when someone using conversations writes to me, what i expect is that i get the message on my desktop, as well as on my mobile client. but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message, if on…

> but conversations will ALWAYS ask the user where he wants to send the message

Must be a bug (or OTR requirement, as OTR doesn't work with multiple devices). XMPP clients shouldn't require sender to choose the recipient's resource, unless sender is explicit that they want to target a specific device.

Re: Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, but Google Didn’t Know

#190

Post by Zash »

jitl wrote: post #162
amelius wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't open chat already solved by Jabber decades ago?

Jabber/XMPP has a number of problems that make it unsuitable for modern chat environments where clients (read: smartphones) have poor connections and frequently want to sleep to conserve power. For example, XMPP wants an always-on TCP connection between the client and the server for the client to appear "online". There's an extension which allows for sleeping, but having async mobile connections in an extension means…

Emphasis on in 2014, that was forever ago in Internet time. XMPP is steadily moving forward and the things mentioned in that post have improved a lot. Check out https://conversations.im/ for example.
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