51–60 of 138 posts
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.
They have something in common though: not letting users communicate outside their own ecosystems.
I really miss the days of being able to use pidgin to talk to everyone
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, ...
XMPP was not a mobile friendly protocol for a while, had efficiently no security out of the box and lacked simplest things like image or other file transfers.
To my knowledge it had most of these things before any other chat protocol was widespread and prior to the great silo-ing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem here is that Pidgin's development didn't manage to keep up with the changing times. Stable branch is 10-15 years behind XMPP features. The developers are working on a Pidgin 3.0 (rewrite?) but that still has quite some way to go. Unfortunately Pidgin was one of the most popular ways to use XMPP back in the day, and this had a knock-on effect on XMPP's reputation as an out-of-date technology. People still…
Was it that pidgin didn’t keep up with features, or more likely that one by one the major platforms pulled xmpp support to the point where there was no reason for a normal person to use pidgin?
You're Facebook. You want to provide an instant messenger you can iterate on quickly. You can put the work into making it XMPP-shaped and working with the community (whatever they means... Are you going to slip ship targets because Pidgin doesn't work as a client for your implementation?). Or you can just write and ship your own service and client at your own pace and not care about any other developer's needs or wants because you're trying to serve Facebook users, not developers.
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.
Combined with JMP.chat, we even get SMS and voice calls from the telephone network to all our different XMPP apps. Truly feels like the future.
The technology of yesteryear seems to have more staying power. The protocols churned out by my generation seem destined for either VC/advertisement capture or death by CADT [0]. Maybe with the exception of Signal (so far...)
This aside, it is much easier to integrate than matrix, things like web hook is just a POST request to /api/send_message...
I think it would take off again with a nice crossplatform client with a discord like interface. But that would be expensive to develop.
XMPP was not a mobile friendly protocol for a while, had efficiently no security out of the box and lacked simplest things like image or other file transfers.
And nowadays it faces a marketing issue because it's extensible, so none of those problems go away because a solution exists somewhere. "Hey, I want to set up a modern messenger." "Sure! Here's XMPP, the ten extensions you need to enable and configure (problem left as an exercise for the reader), and the seven ports you need to open!" "... Okay? A Matrix node is apparently a drop-in solution; I'm gonna use that." XMP…