10 ms·

FastMail: Shutting down our XMPP chat service

186 points by kevinchen 11y ago

stock_toaster 11y ago
In my opinion, and as a customer of Fastmail, I think this is the right call. xmpp as a usable federated chat protocol is pretty much dead. For those who wish to keep using it, setting up your own server (prosody is pretty good!) isn't too hard these days.
colanderman 11y ago
What a sad day. A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps. (Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)
- Camillo 11y ago
  XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.) I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.
  - colanderman 11y ago
    Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps. (Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)
    - techsupporter 11y ago
      > not even pretending to support consumer choice By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it. Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business. That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.
      - colanderman 11y ago
        I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.
        prohor 11y ago
        WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.
        aerique 11y ago
        Yeah, I've never understood this. I've seen it now-and-then when installing WA for family members, but I (and they) have never, ever had to pay for it after using it for multiple years.
        feld 11y ago
        It's free since Facebook bought them. I've had Android friends mention payment screens are still on their WhatsApp though.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place... What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence? Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)
    - Corrado 11y ago
      I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response: "XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices." This capability was indeed one of the major selling points of Apple's messaging system in the most recent iOS & OS X releases. If XMPP cannot keep track of multiple clients then that is a huge flaw in todays mobile world.
      - ge0rg 11y ago
        Unfortunately it is not true. XEP-0280 [0] (Message Carbons; since 2010) forwards your conversation to all your online clients, and XEP-0313 [1] (Message Archive Management; since 2012, but only recently implemented) allows a client to "catch up" with the history when it goes online. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
      - mc7457 11y ago
        Whatsapp never supported this "fundamental feature" and is globally the most used messenger in "todays mobile world" by a wide margin.
        heinrich5991 11y ago
        Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)
        colanderman 11y ago
        A closed proprietary non-interoperable extension on XMPP.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.
  - ge0rg 11y ago
    All these problems have been solved in XMPP years ago, and there are some clients fully supporting the mobile experience and usage of multiple clients. On the Desktop, Swift and Gajim come to my mind, on Android Conversations is getting really awesome (and yaxim, which I am the author of, supports the basic multi-client/mobile use case you are interested in). That said, the XMPP protocol is not perfect, and it is lacking some important elements for a 2010+ mobile chat developer, but considering that it was initially developed in 1999, that mobile chat is only one of its many use cases, and that there are extensions covering all you have asked for, the critique is not appropriate. [0] http://swift.im/swift.html http://swift.im/swift.html [1] http://gajim.org/ http://gajim.org/ [2] http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/ [3] https://yaxim.org/ https://yaxim.org/
    - wink 11y ago
      That's exactly the problem, though. There are so many extensions that it's about as much work finding out which ones are even needed and how they interact for your case (in this case the replay) as is implementing, say, a good chunk of IRC. And no, I'm not exaggerating, I've done both and decided that writing XMPP clients is not for me a long time ago. Addendum: I really love XMPP, but I do think the many many extensions have hurt it more than one defined spec. And yes, I know it supports many use cases, but I simply only care for 1:1 and multi user chat.
      - ge0rg 11y ago
        You are right. The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently preparing to create a list of "must-have" client and server XEPs for certain use cases, like Instant Messaging or IoT. This will hopefully make the path easier for future application developers.
    - goffi 11y ago
      Just for the record, we are also working on a next-gen XMPP client, with decentralized blogging, file sharing, end 2 end encryption and all, and planing to do an Android port. Other projects like Movim also do similar things too, XMPP is definitely very alive these days. Sending message to other devices is managed by message carbons which is in last call for being a standard XEP, and support is becoming more and more common. XMPP is all but deprecated, very active, working well, with a large ecosystem. But is really badly known by most of people(I have by the way started a series of article to explain it: http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp). It's really difficult to be heard these days, but there is a new wave in XMPP world (check our project: http://salut-a-toi.org http://salut-a-toi.org or movim: http://movim.eu http://movim.eu).
  - _yy 11y ago
    Not true, XMPP does have that feature and there are multiple clients which implement this. It works amazingly well. It's not an extension, but part of the standard. Example: http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/
- robotkilla 11y ago
  Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps. But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else. edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets
  - colanderman 11y ago
    It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain. At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?
      - colanderman 11y ago
        Permanent user bans: http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on-users-with-3rd-party-apps-20150306/ http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on...
        dest 11y ago
        I you can hack other's people accounts, it seems a good opportunity to force people out of WhatsApp. Just hack a guy's phone and connect him to WhatsApp through a third party client, get him permanently banned, and voilà!
      - simgidacav 11y ago
        Actually we see attempts to extend libpurple with many recent protocols. For instance telegram works on pidgin AFAIK, and I could recently see se a Tox plugin. Clearly we cannot play a fair game with the closed whatsapp, but hacking cannot be stopped or forbidden. After all, it was always like that. If you go back of 10 years al "regular people" had MSN and similar stuff, and we were IRCing. As a hacker, you migth feel sad, and think openness lost the war. IMHO the only difference is that nowadays we have much more "regular people" than before. They were simply sms-ing before they could access whatsapp.
- mkhpalm 11y ago
  Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop). It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun. These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion. I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
    - ryukafalz 11y ago
      >I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well Matrix (http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.
  - welly 11y ago
    > I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS) You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use. "Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.
  - jfim 11y ago
    Of all the systems to transmit messages, SMS is probably the least proprietary. Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?
- skarap 11y ago
  Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests. Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.
  - colanderman 11y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.
    - Too 11y ago
      Don't they already? Gmail was the embrace-extend phase. Now we are into extinguish. Try setting up your own email server, it will be marked as spam by most major webmail providers.
      - skarap 11y ago
        They still play good with the other few large email services. But with every year using google apps for business is becoming more and more obvious choice from economical POV. In fact I've myself recommended quite a few companies to "just use Google apps". I guess it just takes time too switch phases.
      - vbezhenar 11y ago
        I use my own server, and I can't say that everyone is marking me as a spam. With correct setup and a little bit of good history gmail works fine for me. I removed SPAM label from my mail in Gmail and asked few friends to do the same. Now my mail isn't marked as spam in gmail. And for yandex.ru and mail.ru it worked out of the box.
      - samuellb 11y ago
        I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails? They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I blame Apple[1]. Google's chat was free, but what happens when you have a free and open protocol, and your competitors don't? They consume your chats, but you can't consume theirs. Soon, your chat software can't compete. Apple has repeatedly chosen the path or proprietary when they could do open. They are Microsoft from the 90's with a better PR department. 1: I have little evidence beyond what looks obvious, but that could definitely be wrong. I'm open to new information proving me wrong.
  - nicklaf 11y ago
    Embrace, extend, extinguish.
  - corv 11y ago
    In 2010 Jobs promised "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Afaik it didn't happen because of patent issues.
    - Qantourisc 11y ago
      Patents prevent you from documenting, what is already documented in the patents ?!? I do however recognize the usage of the open standard would be limited by this. But one has options: other users could get a license, or one could try to change the protocol, to be able to avoid (some) patents, allowing both the patented and non patented way. To me it just feels like they just don't care enough.
      - ascagnel_ 11y ago
        Party A may have an agreement or indemnification clause from patent holder B, but they may not have the right to extend that to other parties. So when C comes along and implements party A's new thing, they leave themselves open to lawsuits from party B. Also, patents do not have to document everything. You can leave out some trade secrets, as long as the patent itself documents enough to prove it's a novel invention.
  - gurkendoktor 11y ago
pquerna 11y ago
While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work. Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom? We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience. So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there. But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.
- tjohns 11y ago
  Regarding Docker: You can easily run your own Docker container registry. The DockerHub UI isn't open source, but the underlying server and protocol for fetching/uploading images is. See: https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/ https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/ https://github.com/docker/distribution https://github.com/docker/distribution https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/how-to-use-your-own-registry/ https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/how-to-use-your-own-registry... There are several companies that have implemented alternative container registries. Google (Google Container Registry), CoreOS (Quay) , and JFrog (Artifactory) all come to mind.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  "we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products" One area which hasn't (yet?) succumbed to this is podcasts. The podcast clients I use (Overcast on iOS and Pocket Casts on Android) will accept an RSS URL, and most (all?) podcasts provide such a URL.
LeoPanthera 11y ago
Previous discussion about the death of XMPP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936 My comment from that thread: > I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card. > But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat. > My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week. (It has since been turned off.)
rekoros 11y ago
We've turned chat interoperability into a business over at sameroom.io. What other option is there, really? The other option is no interoperability. A very relevant post: https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hangouts/ https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...
- brazeon 11y ago
  So how this works with federation? I don't see any open/common API.
  - rekoros 11y ago
    It's "federation-as-a-service", basically. A common use case is federation between two Slack teams (share a channel). Another common use case is federation between a group in Skype and a channel on Slack. Or IRC and Telegram, etc. Making existing systems work together really well is priority one. API only makes sense once that's done.
- Tehnix 11y ago
  I can very much recommend this! Recently discovered it, and started gathering all my chats into Slack (you can of course do it in others). Especially getting Freenode and other IRC servers at the tip of my fingers in just one client, is a huge deal. Of course, I could also just connect to everything through IRC (at least for Slack<->IRC), but the Slack client is a lot nicer on mobile than any IRC client I know of.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Chrome complains about your TLS: The certificate chain for this website contains at least one certificate that was signed using a deprecated signature algorithm based on SHA-1. What's weird is that Qualys SSL Labs is giving you "A"s, so maybe they don't check for this condition?
verusfossa 11y ago
This is disappointing, but I don't really blame them. Thankfully, IMAP is too established to succumb to embrace, extend, extinguish although Google seems to be trying. Chat protocols haven't been so lucky. Hopefully federated chat will pick up, but it seems business models around social networking pretty much preclude any kind of federated communication between services. If adoption rates for Diaspora, Friendica, Pump.io, GNUSocial etc. are any indication, XMPP looks doomed. :(
JoshTriplett 11y ago
I had a similar experience. I ran my own XMPP server for several years, so that my email address also worked as an XMPP/Jabber ID. I talked to people across several different services, including an increasing number of folks on Google Talk. Then Google Talk stopped federating properly. Only a bit at first: things like presence notification didn't quite work right, and adding people didn't quite work right. And in the meantime, Hangouts popped up, and offered a more seamless audio/video experience too. Most people I know stopped using Google Talk entirely in favor of Hangouts; the few that remained used it only while the gmail web interface more-or-less supported it. Eventually, federation with Google Talk quite deliberately stopped working. It didn't take long after that before almost everyone else I talked to on it stopped showing up, even those who didn't use Google Talk. People had "last seen" times in the months, and if I wanted to talk to those people in realtime, I sent them text messages, or Twitter DMs, or Hangout calls. So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody to talk to.
- stock_toaster 11y ago
  > So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, > I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. > Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody > to talk to. Exactly mirrors my experience. ;_;
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Sounds like how i watched a local IRC channel wither and die once PCs with Windows XP started shipping. This because XP came with a aggressive marketing for MSN Messenger.
- kawsper 11y ago
  I really enjoyed the interface of GoogleTalk, especially on Windows: http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/GoogleTalk.gif http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/GoogleTalk.gif It was very minimalistic compared to MSN Messenger, sadly Google did seem to favor the web version of it, and it received no updates.
farski 11y ago
As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on my domain, so a standalone service probably isn't going to make sense financially. From a DIY perspective, what are the options? Are Ignite, Prosody, and ejabberd the only viable options? Are they all being maintained? Is there anything out there that works at a small scale; like a Node server that could run on OpenShift, or something else super lightweight?
- stock_toaster 11y ago
  I ran prosody for a while. I found it lightweight, fairly easy to configure, and it worked quite well. Just don't forget to set up the magic srv records if you go the self host route.
- brongondwana 11y ago
  We had a bad experience with ejabberd pre-release version 3 (had an intern spend the entire summer on it, and I put some time in too): http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-ste... Honestly Prosody looks the best. We were planning to switch to it when async login support and scalability to thousands of domains was stable... but that was 2 years ago and it never quite materialised - and now DJabberd is so far behind in support for "standard XMPP" and the interoperability of the remaining servers that we just had to give up. I argued strongly against it, having spent so many bloody years on making this thing work - including tons of patches to DJabberd and some EJabberd hacking as well - but the numbers didn't lie. Better to spend our time on exciting things like the currently-in-testing cross-domain support for Cyrus IMAPd and reverse ACL lookup that will make the LIST command blindingly fast even on big servers. I'm hoping to be able to say two steps forward, one step back this time instead :)
  - hackerboos 11y ago
    Did you look into MongooseIM?
- zanny 11y ago
lyinsteve 11y ago
Apple uses XMPP internally as a way to securely communicate. Doesn't really change much; just thought that'd be an interesting thing to throw out.
- 4ad 11y ago
  What exactly do you mean by that? I'm really curious.
soupbowl 11y ago
I feel that http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ Is the proper open source replacement for XMPP. I changed over to it from XMPP and haven't looked back.
- hackerboos 11y ago
  Ah push notifications the feature we are all looking for in XMPP which is there (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html) but not implemented in any of the open source servers. It's missing websockets support though which would be nice. I found a nice overview of what Matrix.org is doing [2]. [1] - http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#id33 http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#id33 [2] - https://bloggeek.me/matrix-webrtc-interview/ https://bloggeek.me/matrix-webrtc-interview/
zanny 11y ago
Its our fault for letting our parents and cousins and friends start using imessage / hangouts / etc instead of XMPP. We are the ones to blame for its death, because the unwashed masses got locked in to regressive proprietary chat platforms over the past five years and we never pushed the issue. But it doesn't help that XMPP was always awful. It has OpenGL syndrome - too many extensions, described too vaguely, and implemented in too many broken ways to work amongst one another. You get a swarm of mismatched servers and features, and if it did the same thing that would have saved commoner OpenGL adoption, it would probably still be king. That problem is a blessed default implementation. If the foundations that wrote the specs for these low level pipeline APIs were also burdened to make sure the blessed implementation supported the entire standard perfectly, there would be an out of the box open source permissively licensed base for everyone else to build off, rather than the vague wording of technical documentation. I'm just hoping Matrix becomes something. In the same way Vulkan can hopefully save universal graphics programming, Matrix might save IM, but we need to support it. I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo.
- ryukafalz 11y ago
  >I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo. I'm super interested in this - do you have the repo posted anywhere? I love Telepathy and its native clients, but it doesn't support things like remote history retrieval... I feel like that would have to be done before a Matrix CM could work really well.
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  I worked hard to get my family all on XMPP and succeeded. The problem is, they all want to be on iMessage as well, because of course that's what everyone else in the world uses. Eventually iMessage became the de-facto default even inside my family, and there was just no reason for XMPP to exist.
- frozenport 11y ago
  I think the comparison with OpenGL is stretched. The problem with OpenGL is that it was made to a describe a limited hardware pipeline corresponding to a graphics card from the mid 90s. Manipulating this state machine is cumbersome and made more difficult by the lack of easy debugging.
legutierr 11y ago
My company's dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we're doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google Hangouts. Most of our clients prefer the phone, email or SMS/iMessage, but the ones that don't use Skype. If I'm chatting with friends it's probably on Facebook, unless it's on Hangouts. Any video chat my family does is over Facetime. These services are never going to inter-operate, and I hate it. Imagine if we had to maintain different telephone numbers or different email accounts just to communicate with different groups of people. It's almost unimaginable, but that's what we have now with text and video chat. This is core communications infrastructure. These segregated private networks have begun to displace the public telephone network in terms of popularity and importance. These are also the platforms over which video communication is being rolled out--not the public telephone network, as most people would have thought twenty-five years ago. The FCC needs to step in and set some inter-operability rules for the major players here. I have mixed emotions suggesting this, considering that I'm generally opposed to regulation of the Internet. But unless the government steps in, can the situation ever change? Doesn't it need to?
- Atheros 11y ago
  Perhaps we should just wait for one to become a solid monopoly and then our anti-trust laws can take care of it. That seems to be the good middle-ground between freedom from regulation and freedom from monopolies. And it worked out pretty well for our phones.
- troydavis 11y ago
  > Doesn't it need to? No. That's applying a personal preference - one that I also have - to the rest of the population. Most, and quite possibly almost all, users have chosen features above interoperability. Yes, the situation could change, but no, it doesn't need to. Contrast with, say, mobile phone number portability in the US. While one can still argue for or against requiring it, users obviously actually cared and used it. Even when XMPP was popular, very few users left Google.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rascul 11y ago
Interestingly enough, more and more of my friends and family are registering with and using my XMPP server. Jitsi on the laptops and desktops and ChatSecure on the phones are generally the clients they're using.
scrollaway 11y ago
Two insightful previous discussions about XMPP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 I'd highly recommend people read through them, especially if you're interested in fixing the issue.
shmerl 11y ago
Google really betrayed XMPP effort, and Eric Schmidt should be blamed for it. Others aren't any better - just greedy gardeners of their walled gardens.
aikah 11y ago
All I say want to say is we need open protocols (and standards), period. We need choice. Those who want to create wall-gardens are free to do so but we need open protocols and educate users and developers about how important they are. RSS, XMPP and others are used everyday, even by corporations so eager to user proprietary ones for their to keep their users prisoners.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
Ah FFS. It's sad to see that XMPP has come to this. We had the promise of an open Internet and it's being consciously destroyed by the big players, one platform at a time. (By which I mean Google, Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, etc.; all of those companies who have chosen to put a nail in the coffin of the open Internet). Oh well, guess I won't be doing online chat any more. I wonder whether the children even believed the last generation of Roman Britons when they spoke of writing, under floor heating, goods from half a world away...
- bachmeier 11y ago
  Can't speak to the others, but Atlassian shouldn't be on that list. They offer XMPP, I've used it, and it works well.
  - duncan_bayne 11y ago
    Federated XMPP? Or is it just that you can hook an XMPP client up to their walled garden?
Aoyagi 11y ago
Well I hate to see any features shut down even if the alternative means "unsupported operation"... Opera has been doing that a -lot-, the biggest cases being Unite and soon Link. One thing though: >Meanwhile, our XMPP service is now somewhat behind the cutting edge, and lacks support for many of the recent XMPP extensions that the dedicated XMPP users are now beginning to request. Does that mean if they kept silent the service would just run somewhere in the corner, forgotten? ^^
joshstrange 11y ago
To all of those moaning about how great XMPP was: It wasn't. In a multi-device/mobile world XMPP is shit. HN constantly complains about Slack/Hipchat/etc "Reinventing the wheel". "We have IRC and XMPP" they cry without stopping for a second to understand that IRC/XMPP as not trivial to setup correctly, mobile support is complete shit, without things like bouncers or servers to hold all your messages you can lose things and stuff not be in sync, clients can't really add features unless all client can support it, and more. Does it kind of suck that the dream of federated chat died/is dying? Yes but if it doesn't support what users really want then it's the standards fault. I don't blame any of the major players for pulling support, it wasn't going to move fast enough so they ditched it and built something that would.
- hmans 11y ago
  XMPP (like many other similar protocols) is failing not because it's "not moving fast enough", but because open standards are required to make a commitment to simplicity (in order to be inclusive towards as many devices as possibility) which, in many cases, directly opposes the requirements of a business (ie. having unique features.) In the end, it's quite simple: federation and simplicity work _against_ many business cases. This is why this stuff is being dropped by the big players in favor of proprietary solutions left, right and center.
  - joshstrange 11y ago
    Push notifications, message syncing, read receipts, offline sending (as in I'm offline, you send a message, I get it when I log in), encrypted chat, mobile clients, desktop clients, chat room support, direct message support. These are the things I need out of chat and while XMPP had extensions for some of those things finding server software and client that supported it reliably was near impossible.

186 points by kevinchen 11y ago

In my opinion, and as a customer of Fastmail, I think this is the right call. xmpp as a usable federated chat protocol is pretty much dead. For those who wish to keep using it, setting up your own server (prosody is pretty good!) isn't too hard these days.

colanderman 11y ago

What a sad day. A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps. (Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)

Camillo 11y ago
XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.) I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.
- colanderman 11y ago
  Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps. (Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)
  - techsupporter 11y ago
    > not even pretending to support consumer choice By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it. Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business. That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.
    - colanderman 11y ago
      I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.
      - prohor 11y ago
        WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.
        aerique 11y ago
        Yeah, I've never understood this. I've seen it now-and-then when installing WA for family members, but I (and they) have never, ever had to pay for it after using it for multiple years.
        feld 11y ago
        It's free since Facebook bought them. I've had Android friends mention payment screens are still on their WhatsApp though.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place... What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence? Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)
  - Corrado 11y ago
    I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response: "XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices." This capability was indeed one of the major selling points of Apple's messaging system in the most recent iOS & OS X releases. If XMPP cannot keep track of multiple clients then that is a huge flaw in todays mobile world.
    - ge0rg 11y ago
      Unfortunately it is not true. XEP-0280 [0] (Message Carbons; since 2010) forwards your conversation to all your online clients, and XEP-0313 [1] (Message Archive Management; since 2012, but only recently implemented) allows a client to "catch up" with the history when it goes online. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html [1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
    - mc7457 11y ago
      Whatsapp never supported this "fundamental feature" and is globally the most used messenger in "todays mobile world" by a wide margin.
      - heinrich5991 11y ago
        Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)
        colanderman 11y ago
        A closed proprietary non-interoperable extension on XMPP.
- viraptor 11y ago
  While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.
- ge0rg 11y ago
  All these problems have been solved in XMPP years ago, and there are some clients fully supporting the mobile experience and usage of multiple clients. On the Desktop, Swift and Gajim come to my mind, on Android Conversations is getting really awesome (and yaxim, which I am the author of, supports the basic multi-client/mobile use case you are interested in). That said, the XMPP protocol is not perfect, and it is lacking some important elements for a 2010+ mobile chat developer, but considering that it was initially developed in 1999, that mobile chat is only one of its many use cases, and that there are extensions covering all you have asked for, the critique is not appropriate. [0] http://swift.im/swift.html http://swift.im/swift.html [1] http://gajim.org/ http://gajim.org/ [2] http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/ [3] https://yaxim.org/ https://yaxim.org/
  - wink 11y ago
    That's exactly the problem, though. There are so many extensions that it's about as much work finding out which ones are even needed and how they interact for your case (in this case the replay) as is implementing, say, a good chunk of IRC. And no, I'm not exaggerating, I've done both and decided that writing XMPP clients is not for me a long time ago. Addendum: I really love XMPP, but I do think the many many extensions have hurt it more than one defined spec. And yes, I know it supports many use cases, but I simply only care for 1:1 and multi user chat.
    - ge0rg 11y ago
      You are right. The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently preparing to create a list of "must-have" client and server XEPs for certain use cases, like Instant Messaging or IoT. This will hopefully make the path easier for future application developers.
  - goffi 11y ago
    Just for the record, we are also working on a next-gen XMPP client, with decentralized blogging, file sharing, end 2 end encryption and all, and planing to do an Android port. Other projects like Movim also do similar things too, XMPP is definitely very alive these days. Sending message to other devices is managed by message carbons which is in last call for being a standard XEP, and support is becoming more and more common. XMPP is all but deprecated, very active, working well, with a large ecosystem. But is really badly known by most of people(I have by the way started a series of article to explain it: http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp). It's really difficult to be heard these days, but there is a new wave in XMPP world (check our project: http://salut-a-toi.org http://salut-a-toi.org or movim: http://movim.eu http://movim.eu).
- _yy 11y ago
  Not true, XMPP does have that feature and there are multiple clients which implement this. It works amazingly well. It's not an extension, but part of the standard. Example: http://conversations.im/ http://conversations.im/
robotkilla 11y ago
Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps. But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else. edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets
- colanderman 11y ago
  It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain. At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?
    - colanderman 11y ago
      Permanent user bans: http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on-users-with-3rd-party-apps-20150306/ http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on...
      - dest 11y ago
        I you can hack other's people accounts, it seems a good opportunity to force people out of WhatsApp. Just hack a guy's phone and connect him to WhatsApp through a third party client, get him permanently banned, and voilà!
    - simgidacav 11y ago
      Actually we see attempts to extend libpurple with many recent protocols. For instance telegram works on pidgin AFAIK, and I could recently see se a Tox plugin. Clearly we cannot play a fair game with the closed whatsapp, but hacking cannot be stopped or forbidden. After all, it was always like that. If you go back of 10 years al "regular people" had MSN and similar stuff, and we were IRCing. As a hacker, you migth feel sad, and think openness lost the war. IMHO the only difference is that nowadays we have much more "regular people" than before. They were simply sms-ing before they could access whatsapp.
mkhpalm 11y ago
Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop). It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun. These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion. I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
  - ryukafalz 11y ago
    >I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well Matrix (http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.
- welly 11y ago
  > I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS) You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use. "Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.
- jfim 11y ago
  Of all the systems to transmit messages, SMS is probably the least proprietary. Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?
skarap 11y ago
Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests. Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.
- colanderman 11y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.
  - Too 11y ago
    Don't they already? Gmail was the embrace-extend phase. Now we are into extinguish. Try setting up your own email server, it will be marked as spam by most major webmail providers.
    - skarap 11y ago
      They still play good with the other few large email services. But with every year using google apps for business is becoming more and more obvious choice from economical POV. In fact I've myself recommended quite a few companies to "just use Google apps". I guess it just takes time too switch phases.
    - vbezhenar 11y ago
      I use my own server, and I can't say that everyone is marking me as a spam. With correct setup and a little bit of good history gmail works fine for me. I removed SPAM label from my mail in Gmail and asked few friends to do the same. Now my mail isn't marked as spam in gmail. And for yandex.ru and mail.ru it worked out of the box.
    - samuellb 11y ago
      I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails? They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.
kbenson 11y ago
I blame Apple[1]. Google's chat was free, but what happens when you have a free and open protocol, and your competitors don't? They consume your chats, but you can't consume theirs. Soon, your chat software can't compete. Apple has repeatedly chosen the path or proprietary when they could do open. They are Microsoft from the 90's with a better PR department. 1: I have little evidence beyond what looks obvious, but that could definitely be wrong. I'm open to new information proving me wrong.
- nicklaf 11y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- corv 11y ago
  In 2010 Jobs promised "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Afaik it didn't happen because of patent issues.
  - Qantourisc 11y ago
    Patents prevent you from documenting, what is already documented in the patents ?!? I do however recognize the usage of the open standard would be limited by this. But one has options: other users could get a license, or one could try to change the protocol, to be able to avoid (some) patents, allowing both the patented and non patented way. To me it just feels like they just don't care enough.
    - ascagnel_ 11y ago
      Party A may have an agreement or indemnification clause from patent holder B, but they may not have the right to extend that to other parties. So when C comes along and implements party A's new thing, they leave themselves open to lawsuits from party B. Also, patents do not have to document everything. You can leave out some trade secrets, as long as the patent itself documents enough to prove it's a novel invention.
- gurkendoktor 11y ago

pquerna 11y ago

While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work. Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom? We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience. So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there. But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.

tjohns 11y ago
Regarding Docker: You can easily run your own Docker container registry. The DockerHub UI isn't open source, but the underlying server and protocol for fetching/uploading images is. See: https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/ https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/ https://github.com/docker/distribution https://github.com/docker/distribution https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/how-to-use-your-own-registry/ https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/how-to-use-your-own-registry... There are several companies that have implemented alternative container registries. Google (Google Container Registry), CoreOS (Quay) , and JFrog (Artifactory) all come to mind.
rahimnathwani 11y ago
"we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products" One area which hasn't (yet?) succumbed to this is podcasts. The podcast clients I use (Overcast on iOS and Pocket Casts on Android) will accept an RSS URL, and most (all?) podcasts provide such a URL.

LeoPanthera 11y ago

Previous discussion about the death of XMPP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936 My comment from that thread: > I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card. > But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat. > My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week. (It has since been turned off.)

rekoros 11y ago

We've turned chat interoperability into a business over at sameroom.io. What other option is there, really? The other option is no interoperability. A very relevant post: https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hangouts/ https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...

brazeon 11y ago
So how this works with federation? I don't see any open/common API.
- rekoros 11y ago
  It's "federation-as-a-service", basically. A common use case is federation between two Slack teams (share a channel). Another common use case is federation between a group in Skype and a channel on Slack. Or IRC and Telegram, etc. Making existing systems work together really well is priority one. API only makes sense once that's done.
Tehnix 11y ago
I can very much recommend this! Recently discovered it, and started gathering all my chats into Slack (you can of course do it in others). Especially getting Freenode and other IRC servers at the tip of my fingers in just one client, is a huge deal. Of course, I could also just connect to everything through IRC (at least for Slack<->IRC), but the Slack client is a lot nicer on mobile than any IRC client I know of.
jessaustin 11y ago
Chrome complains about your TLS: The certificate chain for this website contains at least one certificate that was signed using a deprecated signature algorithm based on SHA-1. What's weird is that Qualys SSL Labs is giving you "A"s, so maybe they don't check for this condition?

verusfossa 11y ago

This is disappointing, but I don't really blame them. Thankfully, IMAP is too established to succumb to embrace, extend, extinguish although Google seems to be trying. Chat protocols haven't been so lucky. Hopefully federated chat will pick up, but it seems business models around social networking pretty much preclude any kind of federated communication between services. If adoption rates for Diaspora, Friendica, Pump.io, GNUSocial etc. are any indication, XMPP looks doomed. :(

JoshTriplett 11y ago

I had a similar experience. I ran my own XMPP server for several years, so that my email address also worked as an XMPP/Jabber ID. I talked to people across several different services, including an increasing number of folks on Google Talk. Then Google Talk stopped federating properly. Only a bit at first: things like presence notification didn't quite work right, and adding people didn't quite work right. And in the meantime, Hangouts popped up, and offered a more seamless audio/video experience too. Most people I know stopped using Google Talk entirely in favor of Hangouts; the few that remained used it only while the gmail web interface more-or-less supported it. Eventually, federation with Google Talk quite deliberately stopped working. It didn't take long after that before almost everyone else I talked to on it stopped showing up, even those who didn't use Google Talk. People had "last seen" times in the months, and if I wanted to talk to those people in realtime, I sent them text messages, or Twitter DMs, or Hangout calls. So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody to talk to.

stock_toaster 11y ago
> So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, > I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. > Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody > to talk to. Exactly mirrors my experience. ;_;
digi_owl 11y ago
Sounds like how i watched a local IRC channel wither and die once PCs with Windows XP started shipping. This because XP came with a aggressive marketing for MSN Messenger.
kawsper 11y ago
I really enjoyed the interface of GoogleTalk, especially on Windows: http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/GoogleTalk.gif http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/GoogleTalk.gif It was very minimalistic compared to MSN Messenger, sadly Google did seem to favor the web version of it, and it received no updates.

farski 11y ago

As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on my domain, so a standalone service probably isn't going to make sense financially. From a DIY perspective, what are the options? Are Ignite, Prosody, and ejabberd the only viable options? Are they all being maintained? Is there anything out there that works at a small scale; like a Node server that could run on OpenShift, or something else super lightweight?

stock_toaster 11y ago
I ran prosody for a while. I found it lightweight, fairly easy to configure, and it worked quite well. Just don't forget to set up the magic srv records if you go the self host route.
brongondwana 11y ago
We had a bad experience with ejabberd pre-release version 3 (had an intern spend the entire summer on it, and I put some time in too): http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-ste... Honestly Prosody looks the best. We were planning to switch to it when async login support and scalability to thousands of domains was stable... but that was 2 years ago and it never quite materialised - and now DJabberd is so far behind in support for "standard XMPP" and the interoperability of the remaining servers that we just had to give up. I argued strongly against it, having spent so many bloody years on making this thing work - including tons of patches to DJabberd and some EJabberd hacking as well - but the numbers didn't lie. Better to spend our time on exciting things like the currently-in-testing cross-domain support for Cyrus IMAPd and reverse ACL lookup that will make the LIST command blindingly fast even on big servers. I'm hoping to be able to say two steps forward, one step back this time instead :)
- hackerboos 11y ago
  Did you look into MongooseIM?
zanny 11y ago

lyinsteve 11y ago

Apple uses XMPP internally as a way to securely communicate. Doesn't really change much; just thought that'd be an interesting thing to throw out.

4ad 11y ago
What exactly do you mean by that? I'm really curious.

soupbowl 11y ago

I feel that http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ Is the proper open source replacement for XMPP. I changed over to it from XMPP and haven't looked back.

hackerboos 11y ago
Ah push notifications the feature we are all looking for in XMPP which is there (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html) but not implemented in any of the open source servers. It's missing websockets support though which would be nice. I found a nice overview of what Matrix.org is doing [2]. [1] - http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#id33 http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#id33 [2] - https://bloggeek.me/matrix-webrtc-interview/ https://bloggeek.me/matrix-webrtc-interview/

zanny 11y ago

Its our fault for letting our parents and cousins and friends start using imessage / hangouts / etc instead of XMPP. We are the ones to blame for its death, because the unwashed masses got locked in to regressive proprietary chat platforms over the past five years and we never pushed the issue. But it doesn't help that XMPP was always awful. It has OpenGL syndrome - too many extensions, described too vaguely, and implemented in too many broken ways to work amongst one another. You get a swarm of mismatched servers and features, and if it did the same thing that would have saved commoner OpenGL adoption, it would probably still be king. That problem is a blessed default implementation. If the foundations that wrote the specs for these low level pipeline APIs were also burdened to make sure the blessed implementation supported the entire standard perfectly, there would be an out of the box open source permissively licensed base for everyone else to build off, rather than the vague wording of technical documentation. I'm just hoping Matrix becomes something. In the same way Vulkan can hopefully save universal graphics programming, Matrix might save IM, but we need to support it. I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo.

ryukafalz 11y ago
>I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo. I'm super interested in this - do you have the repo posted anywhere? I love Telepathy and its native clients, but it doesn't support things like remote history retrieval... I feel like that would have to be done before a Matrix CM could work really well.
LeoPanthera 11y ago
I worked hard to get my family all on XMPP and succeeded. The problem is, they all want to be on iMessage as well, because of course that's what everyone else in the world uses. Eventually iMessage became the de-facto default even inside my family, and there was just no reason for XMPP to exist.
frozenport 11y ago
I think the comparison with OpenGL is stretched. The problem with OpenGL is that it was made to a describe a limited hardware pipeline corresponding to a graphics card from the mid 90s. Manipulating this state machine is cumbersome and made more difficult by the lack of easy debugging.

legutierr 11y ago

My company's dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we're doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google Hangouts. Most of our clients prefer the phone, email or SMS/iMessage, but the ones that don't use Skype. If I'm chatting with friends it's probably on Facebook, unless it's on Hangouts. Any video chat my family does is over Facetime. These services are never going to inter-operate, and I hate it. Imagine if we had to maintain different telephone numbers or different email accounts just to communicate with different groups of people. It's almost unimaginable, but that's what we have now with text and video chat. This is core communications infrastructure. These segregated private networks have begun to displace the public telephone network in terms of popularity and importance. These are also the platforms over which video communication is being rolled out--not the public telephone network, as most people would have thought twenty-five years ago. The FCC needs to step in and set some inter-operability rules for the major players here. I have mixed emotions suggesting this, considering that I'm generally opposed to regulation of the Internet. But unless the government steps in, can the situation ever change? Doesn't it need to?

Atheros 11y ago
Perhaps we should just wait for one to become a solid monopoly and then our anti-trust laws can take care of it. That seems to be the good middle-ground between freedom from regulation and freedom from monopolies. And it worked out pretty well for our phones.
troydavis 11y ago
> Doesn't it need to? No. That's applying a personal preference - one that I also have - to the rest of the population. Most, and quite possibly almost all, users have chosen features above interoperability. Yes, the situation could change, but no, it doesn't need to. Contrast with, say, mobile phone number portability in the US. While one can still argue for or against requiring it, users obviously actually cared and used it. Even when XMPP was popular, very few users left Google.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rascul 11y ago

Interestingly enough, more and more of my friends and family are registering with and using my XMPP server. Jitsi on the laptops and desktops and ChatSecure on the phones are generally the clients they're using.

scrollaway 11y ago

Two insightful previous discussions about XMPP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541 I'd highly recommend people read through them, especially if you're interested in fixing the issue.

shmerl 11y ago

Google really betrayed XMPP effort, and Eric Schmidt should be blamed for it. Others aren't any better - just greedy gardeners of their walled gardens.

aikah 11y ago

All I say want to say is we need open protocols (and standards), period. We need choice. Those who want to create wall-gardens are free to do so but we need open protocols and educate users and developers about how important they are. RSS, XMPP and others are used everyday, even by corporations so eager to user proprietary ones for their to keep their users prisoners.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

Ah FFS. It's sad to see that XMPP has come to this. We had the promise of an open Internet and it's being consciously destroyed by the big players, one platform at a time. (By which I mean Google, Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, etc.; all of those companies who have chosen to put a nail in the coffin of the open Internet). Oh well, guess I won't be doing online chat any more. I wonder whether the children even believed the last generation of Roman Britons when they spoke of writing, under floor heating, goods from half a world away...

bachmeier 11y ago
Can't speak to the others, but Atlassian shouldn't be on that list. They offer XMPP, I've used it, and it works well.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  Federated XMPP? Or is it just that you can hook an XMPP client up to their walled garden?

Aoyagi 11y ago

Well I hate to see any features shut down even if the alternative means "unsupported operation"... Opera has been doing that a -lot-, the biggest cases being Unite and soon Link. One thing though: >Meanwhile, our XMPP service is now somewhat behind the cutting edge, and lacks support for many of the recent XMPP extensions that the dedicated XMPP users are now beginning to request. Does that mean if they kept silent the service would just run somewhere in the corner, forgotten? ^^

joshstrange 11y ago

To all of those moaning about how great XMPP was: It wasn't. In a multi-device/mobile world XMPP is shit. HN constantly complains about Slack/Hipchat/etc "Reinventing the wheel". "We have IRC and XMPP" they cry without stopping for a second to understand that IRC/XMPP as not trivial to setup correctly, mobile support is complete shit, without things like bouncers or servers to hold all your messages you can lose things and stuff not be in sync, clients can't really add features unless all client can support it, and more. Does it kind of suck that the dream of federated chat died/is dying? Yes but if it doesn't support what users really want then it's the standards fault. I don't blame any of the major players for pulling support, it wasn't going to move fast enough so they ditched it and built something that would.

hmans 11y ago
XMPP (like many other similar protocols) is failing not because it's "not moving fast enough", but because open standards are required to make a commitment to simplicity (in order to be inclusive towards as many devices as possibility) which, in many cases, directly opposes the requirements of a business (ie. having unique features.) In the end, it's quite simple: federation and simplicity work _against_ many business cases. This is why this stuff is being dropped by the big players in favor of proprietary solutions left, right and center.
- joshstrange 11y ago
  Push notifications, message syncing, read receipts, offline sending (as in I'm offline, you send a message, I get it when I log in), encrypted chat, mobile clients, desktop clients, chat room support, direct message support. These are the things I need out of chat and while XMPP had extensions for some of those things finding server software and client that supported it reliably was near impossible.