3 ms·

I think the real issue here is that too many people conflate XMPP the protocol with the various XMPP based services (most of the smaller free public services do

I think the real issue here is that too many people conflate XMPP the protocol with the various XMPP based services (most of the smaller free public services do this). If we tell people to "go sign up for an XMPP account" it's obviously going to be too complicated; they're going to search, find the XSF websites or a bunch of random libraries and protocol information, and give up. Meanwhile, companies can use XMPP and build their own brand around chat products based on it (while never mentioning it, because their users don't care) and regardless of whether they choose to federate or not they can reap the benefits of a community of protocol developers, the plethora of libraries, and maybe even existing client and server code.

niftich 10y ago
Didn't OpenID have this exact same problem? Interestingly, email didn't, despite acronyms like POP3, IMAP, SMTP being a frequent occurrence once you try to supply an email client of your choice. So what was different about email, once internet users started escaping the walled gardens of old?
- SamWhited 10y ago
  I don't know the history of OpenID at all, and don't know the history of email well enough to comment, but I suspect email didn't become a common word overnight, and I doubt most people would know how to use a client that asks them for SMTP settings these days (they expect to just visit gmail.com and see messages, or maybe at the most complicated install Thunderbird, enter their username and password, and wait while it says "autoconfiguring" for a bit).
- rakoo 10y ago
  Users were all registered by default to an email account at their ISP. All of them could send emails back and forth to people inside and outside their ISP. When they started to suck, they registered new addresses on specialized email providers, and they kept their contact list with them, so emails could still be used. Because emails was pretty much the first way of communicating and because of how common it is it won't disappear soon.

niftich 10y ago

Didn't OpenID have this exact same problem? Interestingly, email didn't, despite acronyms like POP3, IMAP, SMTP being a frequent occurrence once you try to supply an email client of your choice. So what was different about email, once internet users started escaping the walled gardens of old?

SamWhited 10y ago
I don't know the history of OpenID at all, and don't know the history of email well enough to comment, but I suspect email didn't become a common word overnight, and I doubt most people would know how to use a client that asks them for SMTP settings these days (they expect to just visit gmail.com and see messages, or maybe at the most complicated install Thunderbird, enter their username and password, and wait while it says "autoconfiguring" for a bit).
rakoo 10y ago
Users were all registered by default to an email account at their ISP. All of them could send emails back and forth to people inside and outside their ISP. When they started to suck, they registered new addresses on specialized email providers, and they kept their contact list with them, so emails could still be used. Because emails was pretty much the first way of communicating and because of how common it is it won't disappear soon.