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It's also instructive to reflect over the other federated internet communications protocol: E-mail. It pretty much works, and that's great, but barely a week g
by mseebach 11y ago
It's also instructive to reflect over the other federated internet communications protocol: E-mail.
It pretty much works, and that's great, but barely a week goes by when HN doesn't have an article lamenting the lack of useful spam-control or encryption/sender verification and many other things. E-mail is still a very poor medium to facilitate long threads with many participants. E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking. E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.
These deficiencies are all easy to fix in a technical sense, but practically impossible to address due to the federated nature of the system. The few changes we do end up getting (HTML bodies, and even MIME before then) are long and painful, and are largely resolved by "might is right". Others unilaterally break fundamental features, such as curbing spam by essentially banning decentralised SMTP. If you rely on being able to send out large quantities of email, you either have to pay a gatekeeper, or hire a specialist in the dark arts of actually have your email go through. This dark art consists of keeping track of the many ways in which the large players in the e-mail world systematically break the protocol to combat spam.
We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.
XMPP fails because it tries to, indeed needs to, boil the ocean. There's an extension, or two or seven, for every conceivable feature and use case, and so you need to choose which set of features in a n-furcated (where n is tragically large) set you want/need, and live with the fact the these aren't perfectly compatible with deployments that has made other choices. And so the federation and standards compatibility is really only theoretical, and then, what's the point? If spam killed truly federated email (and the need for actual working encryption might well finish it off), mobile killed XMPP.
Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.
- pmlnr 11y ago> E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking Let me introduce you to IMAP IDLE. > E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking. Jira, for example, has a pretty good one. > We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email. I've been running my own mail stack for 8+ years. The reason is simple: only I can mess it up. No 3rd party to lock me out from my communication, no 3rd party to decide what I can send. If it fails, it's my fault only. And I'm still using email. I do occasionally get spam, but most of them is already dropped by blacklisting and a few intelligent rule; the rest is catched by dspam. XMPP is overcomplicated, solving nothing IRC can't solve already ( imho, of course ); that is why it's failing. What we need for the more open source approach is people to value their communication and not to trust 3rd party because the look/act cool. > Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability. They won't. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness.
- antsar 11y ago> They won't. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness. They (the incumbents) won't. But someone will, in the same way that WordPress replaced hosted blog platforms for many. Might be wishful thinking, but this seems like it could happen some day.
- Zikes 11y ago> no 3rd party to decide what I can send It's my understanding that the biggest hurdle in owning your own email stack is that a lot of 3rd parties decide what they'll receive, and hold senders to very strict standards. Have you experienced many issues with recipients on various platforms not receiving your emails?
- pmlnr 11y agoReceiving was never an issue; landing in spam, is sent from some exotic software, that happened. But I may have chosen the words; the main reasons it that I don't want anyone to let decide or mistakenly delete/close/block me out of my own account.
- xorcist 11y agoI have worked in this area for a long time, and it's very rare that this causes any problems unless you are a spammer (or "news-letter sender"). You won't end up on black lists unless there is a mistake. It's an annoyance when that happens, but that happens for the major players as well. I often feel the ambivalence to your own mail servers is unfounded. A basic apt-get for Postfix and Dovecot will give you secure defaults. The only thing you need to do then is to set up the certificates, the dns records, and keep up with what happens in the future. It's absolutely comparable to running your own web server, where you also need to change a cert or two over time.