61–70 of 82 posts
XMPP is a very resilient protocol that has survived the years of neglect and mismanagement by the XSF.
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> 2. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push notifications? That's a problem with the iphone, not xmpp. Apple restricts what you can do with your hardware and offers no other options than their push notification approach. You cannot blame existing protocols for apple's distributed-software-hostile whims of the…
As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.
XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…
1) Host your own server, don't make it public. 2) The fact that there were so many non-mandatory and sometimes competing XEPs was a major setback indeed. 3) There were measures for that, such as that unknown users should answer "how much is pi*0" kind of questions Matrix seems to solve items 2 and 4, lets see how much traction it gets.
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When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at the time. At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work like that? I think X…
I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful. On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.
TBF, we asked them to let us use the protocol, or make it part of IMPP, or get actively involved in IMPP.
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"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?" Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient & the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.
"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it" I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately. I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem…
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As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.
As an iphone user, I am not, and I am sure that apple could find a way to allow push notifications on the web without the battery taking a major hit.
It seems like with the right client that IRC could basically do what Discord does today, but without the need for all the bloat.
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I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful. On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.
Not all parts of the protocol are awful. Many stupid extensions (XEPs) sure are bad, chiefly, MUCs. However, this breaking down of the protocol to small components is the strength of the protocol, not a weakness.
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It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit and with Google, Microsoft, &c it's impossible to get to anyone to resolve the issue once you know about it. Even for small companies this is a nightmare.
Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV. And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either. And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everythin…
It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you can reliably communicate with 95% of people.
*Numbers made up to illustrate the point.
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As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.
Certain that Riot.im does these things, doesn't destroy battery.