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Moxie Marlinspike has a blog post about why protocols like XMPP aren't good enough to support modern messaging apps. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-mo

Moxie Marlinspike has a blog post about why protocols like XMPP aren't good enough to support modern messaging apps. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world? Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.

kuschku 9y ago
And yet, this is what you can get today with several IRC clients already: https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 IRCCloud is using only standard IRC features to implement their Slack gateway that offers all features of slack - including reactions and threads. Federated protocols can move extremely quickly, I've seen that myself recently.
lallysingh 9y ago
Extension availability/usage will cluster around the tent-pole implementations. A really popular mobile Jabber client will suddenly have the extensions it supports become popular with everyone else. Conversations looks nice. As for why some set of extensions hasn't been brought up to modernity, that answer's simple: nobody cares about xmpp enough. Maybe just some users, but fuck those guys, they don't build anything.
- znpy 9y ago
  >> A really popular mobile Jabber client will > Will Man, xmpp has been out for twenty years now.
  - e12e 9y ago
    Irony here is that WhatsApp, Google and Facebook all had xmpp working (in their own silos) for mobile. WhatsApp still do.
- bastawhiz 9y ago
  > A really popular mobile Jabber client will suddenly have the extensions it supports become popular with everyone else Until you have two popular apps that implement two different extensions that accomplish the same thing. Now everyone is stuck implementing two, three, four extensions to display the same content. God forbid there's a new version of an extension that's backwards incompatible.
Zak 9y ago
Tangentially related, I have to take issue with this: > addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers Phone numbers are owned by telecoms, not users. Sometimes they're transferable between telecoms, but not always. I, in particular travel internationally often and do not maintain phone service in the same country continuously. I've had to change phone numbers with Signal and Whatsapp a couple times now and have not found it to be a particularly friendly experience. I got a free Google Voice number and might use that in the future, but I had to tie that to another US-based phone number. What will happen if someone else starts using that number, especially if they also connect a Google Voice account to it? I don't know that I have a better design in mind, but using a phone number as an identity has some nasty edge cases.
- amphibian87 9y ago
  Turn message forwarding off and nothing will happen, I've lent my cell # to broke friends afew times to make a Google Voice account, and have a Voice number myself for Craigslist exchanges, lapses between paying my carrier, etc
  - gcb0 9y ago
    you seem to miss the point. 1) get US phone 2) register google voice to US phone 3) stop paying for US phone 4) you can't de-register you US phone, unless you register a new one 5a) if you never sign up for a US phone, anybody can get assigned that number and click "forgot password" on your google voice. 5b) you get a new US phone: go to 2. that is true for every single service that ties you up to a phone number or that has phone number as recovery option.
    - jdeibele 9y ago
      Pay $20 and you get the number permanently. I've set up my kids' soccer club and my son's Cub Scout Pack with voicemail-only numbers. Callers leave a message and a recording and a transcription is forwarded to the appropriate person via email. I've also read using Google Voice is highly recommended for things that require a voice or text number since it's very difficult to get hold of someone at Google that can be socially engineered. Much easier to scream at somebody at Verizon, etc.
mjevans 9y ago
If it's not in the baseline spec it isn't going to happen. It would at least have been nice if the 'extensions' had a required way to be opaquely handled and saved as files so that other tools could use them.
inputmice 9y ago
And here is the response to that https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html

kuschku 9y ago

And yet, this is what you can get today with several IRC clients already: https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721?s=21 IRCCloud is using only standard IRC features to implement their Slack gateway that offers all features of slack - including reactions and threads. Federated protocols can move extremely quickly, I've seen that myself recently.

lallysingh 9y ago

Extension availability/usage will cluster around the tent-pole implementations. A really popular mobile Jabber client will suddenly have the extensions it supports become popular with everyone else. Conversations looks nice. As for why some set of extensions hasn't been brought up to modernity, that answer's simple: nobody cares about xmpp enough. Maybe just some users, but fuck those guys, they don't build anything.

znpy 9y ago
>> A really popular mobile Jabber client will > Will Man, xmpp has been out for twenty years now.
- e12e 9y ago
  Irony here is that WhatsApp, Google and Facebook all had xmpp working (in their own silos) for mobile. WhatsApp still do.
bastawhiz 9y ago
> A really popular mobile Jabber client will suddenly have the extensions it supports become popular with everyone else Until you have two popular apps that implement two different extensions that accomplish the same thing. Now everyone is stuck implementing two, three, four extensions to display the same content. God forbid there's a new version of an extension that's backwards incompatible.

Zak 9y ago

Tangentially related, I have to take issue with this: > addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers Phone numbers are owned by telecoms, not users. Sometimes they're transferable between telecoms, but not always. I, in particular travel internationally often and do not maintain phone service in the same country continuously. I've had to change phone numbers with Signal and Whatsapp a couple times now and have not found it to be a particularly friendly experience. I got a free Google Voice number and might use that in the future, but I had to tie that to another US-based phone number. What will happen if someone else starts using that number, especially if they also connect a Google Voice account to it? I don't know that I have a better design in mind, but using a phone number as an identity has some nasty edge cases.

amphibian87 9y ago
Turn message forwarding off and nothing will happen, I've lent my cell # to broke friends afew times to make a Google Voice account, and have a Voice number myself for Craigslist exchanges, lapses between paying my carrier, etc
- gcb0 9y ago
  you seem to miss the point. 1) get US phone 2) register google voice to US phone 3) stop paying for US phone 4) you can't de-register you US phone, unless you register a new one 5a) if you never sign up for a US phone, anybody can get assigned that number and click "forgot password" on your google voice. 5b) you get a new US phone: go to 2. that is true for every single service that ties you up to a phone number or that has phone number as recovery option.
  - jdeibele 9y ago
    Pay $20 and you get the number permanently. I've set up my kids' soccer club and my son's Cub Scout Pack with voicemail-only numbers. Callers leave a message and a recording and a transcription is forwarded to the appropriate person via email. I've also read using Google Voice is highly recommended for things that require a voice or text number since it's very difficult to get hold of someone at Google that can be socially engineered. Much easier to scream at somebody at Verizon, etc.

mjevans 9y ago

If it's not in the baseline spec it isn't going to happen. It would at least have been nice if the 'extensions' had a required way to be opaquely handled and saved as files so that other tools could use them.

inputmice 9y ago

And here is the response to that https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html