5 ms·

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems? In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account t

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems? In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?

black_puppydog 6y ago
facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned. I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on facebook and I would read it on google!" I could see something die in their eyes when I explained that not only was there a solution to this, but also, facebook and google had both already decided to kill that solution. Oh well... don't buy into walled gardens kids.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail. [1] This part is the joke.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    Even though it's widely recognized as impossible for individuals to self-host, at least there are many available providers, and any medium+ size organization can self-host. Things could be better but they could be worse too.
    - lsh123 6y ago
      I host my family & friends email server for about a half dozen domains for the last 20 years using postfix with courier imap. Once every 5 years, Gmail doesn’t like something and starts sending my emails to spam but it resolves by itself in 2 weeks ;) Otherwise, the only maintenance is OS upgrades every 6 months or so.
    - gsich 6y ago
      By whom? The crowd on HN? Selfhosting email is obviously doable. Selfhosting does not imply residential IP.
      - jimktrains2 6y ago
        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.
        gsich 6y ago
        Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.
        megous 6y ago
        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 everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable. As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered. Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.
  - gspr 6y ago
    > Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. Think of the value of this! Anyone, anywhere, using whatever client they choose, can send a basic message to anyone and expect it to arrive and be taken seriously. Imagine if IM had worked the same way! I know XMPP is a shitstorm, but one can dream. Not until I left academia and started working for MegaCorp that mandates outlook web as the only email client did I truly internalize the value of this.
    - rakoo 6y ago
      IM can work the same way, by tacking it on top of email: https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/ (Bonus: encryption is done automatically for you, by default)
      - parliament32 6y ago
        Email is not a synchronous channel, and shouldn't be treated as such. Plenty of mailservers will happily delay your messages for a few minutes for spam and virus scanning (because who cares if an email arrives a minute later), and you have all sorts of asynchronous things built into the major servers and protocols (queues, delays/greylisting, 4-day(!!) backoff-retries, etc).
        rakoo 6y ago
        Most of the IM of today isn't synchronous as well. That's the exact reason OTR was deemed not enough, because it requires synchronization, and the Open Whisper guys came up with a novel encryption scheme that works with asynchronicity in mind. Now of course that doesn't mean you should never be synchronous, and it is true email might not be the best vector here. But from my little experience it's good enough for simple messaging.
rektide 6y ago
"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.
- sacks2k 6y ago
  "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 to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past. It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats. Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.
  - andrewshadura 6y ago
    "We have reviewed the content you reported and found it doesn't go against our Community Standards." This is the response I get 99% of times when I report blatant racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories.
  - sp332 6y ago
    In May, The Daily Wire was the #7 most-interacted-with publisher on FB. https://www.newswhip.com/2020/06/top-publishers-facebook-may-2020/ https://www.newswhip.com/2020/06/top-publishers-facebook-may... They have more interactions per article than CNN and Huffington Post combined.
  - 6y ago
Jtsummers 6y ago
XMPP was only the protocol. Google and others provided federation with it then took it away later. This decimated the social network size. When the vast majority connects to others primarily via Google Talk and its descendants or Facebook messenger, XMPP, as a protocol, didn’t stand a chance.
jcahill 6y ago
Bridges were shut down to push proprietary chat spinoffs of social media websites. Ex. Facebook had an XMPP bridge for a couple years but shut it down for this reason.
justinsaccount 6y ago
Probably around 2011 I was trying to push for XMPP at a .edu for internal chat (they was no current system at all). Around that time the iPad was showing up everywhere and I found was that there were zero good iOS XMPP clients. Every single one we tried, I'd notice it was proxying the credentials through a 3rd party server to deal with the lack of background connection support and to handle the push notifications. This was a major security issue, and also meant it would have been unusable during an internet outage. This sort of thing, combined with the lack of server side history was probably what killed it.
- toast0 6y ago
  Yeah, Android in 2011 could just run a connection in the background and actually work (assuming the client pings when idle / and adapts the ping interval to avoid stateful firewalls with low idle timeouts). But iOS doesn't let you do background sockets, so you need push messages, and that's hard to coordinate between unrelated XMPP servers and clients. Of course, modern Android doesn't let you have background sockets either.
  - Arnt 6y ago
    I have an android app that uses background connections; it works fine on modern Android. The connections are broken when people walk in and out of WLAN coverage, but as long as the app uses minimal CPU and network traffic Android doesn't intercede much.
    - toast0 6y ago
      Hmmm. Doesn't Android Doze randomly kill/pause your background execution?
      - Arnt 6y ago
        Not so I've really noticed. The user starting apps that require very much memory probably does too, but that's also a minor effect. If you don't use scheduled jobs to reopen your connections, WLAN/mobile switching is a pain and there are some smaller similar pains. If you solve that big pain and make sure to use very little battery power, the smaller pains go away.
kalleboo 6y ago
Mobile push notifications and chat history sync
codezero 6y ago
My tinfoil hat theory (that others may have had, or it may be something I read somewhere...) is that the XMPP protocol was part of what made PRISM successful, and the timing of these orgs adding XMPP is kind of aligned with when they were “online” for PRISM. I’m pretty sure the larger orgs that were targeted could tell that the only way this information leaked easily, or was justified, was because of XMPP metadata, or some other large scale flaw. The XMPP group also had a pretty visible security/encryption lockdown that I didn’t feel like was explained well, or maybe I just didn’t understand it :) https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.txt https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...

black_puppydog 6y ago

facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned. I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on facebook and I would read it on google!" I could see something die in their eyes when I explained that not only was there a solution to this, but also, facebook and google had both already decided to kill that solution. Oh well... don't buy into walled gardens kids.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail. [1] This part is the joke.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Even though it's widely recognized as impossible for individuals to self-host, at least there are many available providers, and any medium+ size organization can self-host. Things could be better but they could be worse too.
  - lsh123 6y ago
    I host my family & friends email server for about a half dozen domains for the last 20 years using postfix with courier imap. Once every 5 years, Gmail doesn’t like something and starts sending my emails to spam but it resolves by itself in 2 weeks ;) Otherwise, the only maintenance is OS upgrades every 6 months or so.
  - gsich 6y ago
    By whom? The crowd on HN? Selfhosting email is obviously doable. Selfhosting does not imply residential IP.
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      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.
      - gsich 6y ago
        Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.
      - megous 6y ago
        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 everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable. As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered. Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.
- gspr 6y ago
  > Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. Think of the value of this! Anyone, anywhere, using whatever client they choose, can send a basic message to anyone and expect it to arrive and be taken seriously. Imagine if IM had worked the same way! I know XMPP is a shitstorm, but one can dream. Not until I left academia and started working for MegaCorp that mandates outlook web as the only email client did I truly internalize the value of this.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    IM can work the same way, by tacking it on top of email: https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/ (Bonus: encryption is done automatically for you, by default)
    - parliament32 6y ago
      Email is not a synchronous channel, and shouldn't be treated as such. Plenty of mailservers will happily delay your messages for a few minutes for spam and virus scanning (because who cares if an email arrives a minute later), and you have all sorts of asynchronous things built into the major servers and protocols (queues, delays/greylisting, 4-day(!!) backoff-retries, etc).
      - rakoo 6y ago
        Most of the IM of today isn't synchronous as well. That's the exact reason OTR was deemed not enough, because it requires synchronization, and the Open Whisper guys came up with a novel encryption scheme that works with asynchronicity in mind. Now of course that doesn't mean you should never be synchronous, and it is true email might not be the best vector here. But from my little experience it's good enough for simple messaging.

rektide 6y ago

"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.

sacks2k 6y ago
"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 to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past. It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats. Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.
- andrewshadura 6y ago
  "We have reviewed the content you reported and found it doesn't go against our Community Standards." This is the response I get 99% of times when I report blatant racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories.
- sp332 6y ago
  In May, The Daily Wire was the #7 most-interacted-with publisher on FB. https://www.newswhip.com/2020/06/top-publishers-facebook-may-2020/ https://www.newswhip.com/2020/06/top-publishers-facebook-may... They have more interactions per article than CNN and Huffington Post combined.
- 6y ago

Jtsummers 6y ago

XMPP was only the protocol. Google and others provided federation with it then took it away later. This decimated the social network size. When the vast majority connects to others primarily via Google Talk and its descendants or Facebook messenger, XMPP, as a protocol, didn’t stand a chance.

jcahill 6y ago

Bridges were shut down to push proprietary chat spinoffs of social media websites. Ex. Facebook had an XMPP bridge for a couple years but shut it down for this reason.

justinsaccount 6y ago

Probably around 2011 I was trying to push for XMPP at a .edu for internal chat (they was no current system at all). Around that time the iPad was showing up everywhere and I found was that there were zero good iOS XMPP clients. Every single one we tried, I'd notice it was proxying the credentials through a 3rd party server to deal with the lack of background connection support and to handle the push notifications. This was a major security issue, and also meant it would have been unusable during an internet outage. This sort of thing, combined with the lack of server side history was probably what killed it.

toast0 6y ago
Yeah, Android in 2011 could just run a connection in the background and actually work (assuming the client pings when idle / and adapts the ping interval to avoid stateful firewalls with low idle timeouts). But iOS doesn't let you do background sockets, so you need push messages, and that's hard to coordinate between unrelated XMPP servers and clients. Of course, modern Android doesn't let you have background sockets either.
- Arnt 6y ago
  I have an android app that uses background connections; it works fine on modern Android. The connections are broken when people walk in and out of WLAN coverage, but as long as the app uses minimal CPU and network traffic Android doesn't intercede much.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Hmmm. Doesn't Android Doze randomly kill/pause your background execution?
    - Arnt 6y ago
      Not so I've really noticed. The user starting apps that require very much memory probably does too, but that's also a minor effect. If you don't use scheduled jobs to reopen your connections, WLAN/mobile switching is a pain and there are some smaller similar pains. If you solve that big pain and make sure to use very little battery power, the smaller pains go away.

kalleboo 6y ago

Mobile push notifications and chat history sync

codezero 6y ago

My tinfoil hat theory (that others may have had, or it may be something I read somewhere...) is that the XMPP protocol was part of what made PRISM successful, and the timing of these orgs adding XMPP is kind of aligned with when they were “online” for PRISM. I’m pretty sure the larger orgs that were targeted could tell that the only way this information leaked easily, or was justified, was because of XMPP metadata, or some other large scale flaw. The XMPP group also had a pretty visible security/encryption lockdown that I didn’t feel like was explained well, or maybe I just didn’t understand it :) https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.txt https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...