4 ms·

Jabber needed reinventing. XMPP grew and thrived in the early 2000s and died as every participant fragmented off to spin up a proprietary walled garden replacem

by zanny 6y ago

Jabber needed reinventing. XMPP grew and thrived in the early 2000s and died as every participant fragmented off to spin up a proprietary walled garden replacement. You then need something better than XMPP to fight back against that partitioning of the messaging space because XMPP implementations became too fragmented in feature compatibility to reliably compete.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Part of me wonders if this is a fatal flaw in the very concept of distributed systems. It seems to me that as soon as a protocol or technology loses its single authority (multiple companies write implementations) it becomes feature frozen since it would be impossible for multiple companies to come to an agreement on what the new features should be or getting them all to implement them. If matrix actually does succeed and continue to change I think it will result in having only 1-2 server implementations and 1 client per platform. A hobby dev can't possibly keep up with all the features being implemented by a whole team working on the main client.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  it doesn’t have to be a fatal flaw. you “just” have to layer the protocol to give decent abstractions to allow diversity on top of each layer, so as each layer matures you just keep innovating upwards - like the ethernet/ip/tcp/http stack for instance.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    The problem I see is every time you drop an extra layer of innovation, you fragment the final product. For example, Apple adds person to person payments in imessage and it suddenly just works for every single imessage user. If someone did that as a feature on top of matrix you now have a situation where some clients support it and some don't so the feature never really gets used as its too unreliable. Maybe over time the feature rolls out to more clients but there will always be some devs who think "No I don't like this feature, I won't ever add it" I guess things are a little simpler here since it might be possible to implement new features without server changes as they may just work on top of the standard matrix spec.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      This is a great example. Matrix has the concept of widgets which let you embed little webapps, which can be used as a compatibility layer for stuff like payments. For instance video conferencing is done in Matrix as a widget (Jitsi) for clients who just support widgets... but clients with native jitsi support (Element iOS and Android) integrate it natively rather than using a widget.
mbirth 6y ago
XMPP is anything but dead yet. There were a lot of XEPs added and updated in recent years and it turned into a modern protocol being able to provide all features you could expect from a modern messaging service. It's just that you need a client and server that supports those features. Daniel Gultsch has written an Android client[1], that's as good as it can be. He also offers a maintained XMPP server [2] providing the full-featured counterpart. But if you want to self-host, ejabberd supports all the features as does Prosody. For iOS users, there's Monal which is slowly getting there. [1] https://conversations.im https://conversations.im [2] https://account.conversations.im https://account.conversations.im
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  Needing a client that supports those features seems like a big ask, though. You're right that Conversations is about as good as an XMPP client can be, and it's a joy to use... but it's one of very few. Among other things, my server has message archiving configured for MUCs, but Conversations is the only client I've ever been able to get to sync that history locally. That's something I just don't ever have to worry about with Matrix. (Not that I don't have other complaints with Matrix.)
  - mbirth 6y ago
    How many different full-featured Matrix clients do you know? And what about lean ones that don’t come in a huge Electron package? Also, Gajim has support for MAM and can sync everything locally. I believe Monal has it, too.
    - ryukafalz 6y ago
      Also not many, but they all get history syncing down. They have to, it's at the core of the protocol. (And that aside, at least Element is available on just about every platform.) Yes, I've heard that Gajim and Monal support it. I'm running both of them right now; Gajim doesn't appear to be fetching history from the server for the MUC I'm looking at in either the chat or history windows, Monal seems to attempt to but shows a progress spinner indefinitely. Conversations successfully loads history from the server; I can scroll back to well before I got this phone so I know it's not just local.

by zanny 6y ago

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

Part of me wonders if this is a fatal flaw in the very concept of distributed systems. It seems to me that as soon as a protocol or technology loses its single authority (multiple companies write implementations) it becomes feature frozen since it would be impossible for multiple companies to come to an agreement on what the new features should be or getting them all to implement them. If matrix actually does succeed and continue to change I think it will result in having only 1-2 server implementations and 1 client per platform. A hobby dev can't possibly keep up with all the features being implemented by a whole team working on the main client.

Arathorn 6y ago
it doesn’t have to be a fatal flaw. you “just” have to layer the protocol to give decent abstractions to allow diversity on top of each layer, so as each layer matures you just keep innovating upwards - like the ethernet/ip/tcp/http stack for instance.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  The problem I see is every time you drop an extra layer of innovation, you fragment the final product. For example, Apple adds person to person payments in imessage and it suddenly just works for every single imessage user. If someone did that as a feature on top of matrix you now have a situation where some clients support it and some don't so the feature never really gets used as its too unreliable. Maybe over time the feature rolls out to more clients but there will always be some devs who think "No I don't like this feature, I won't ever add it" I guess things are a little simpler here since it might be possible to implement new features without server changes as they may just work on top of the standard matrix spec.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    This is a great example. Matrix has the concept of widgets which let you embed little webapps, which can be used as a compatibility layer for stuff like payments. For instance video conferencing is done in Matrix as a widget (Jitsi) for clients who just support widgets... but clients with native jitsi support (Element iOS and Android) integrate it natively rather than using a widget.

mbirth 6y ago

XMPP is anything but dead yet. There were a lot of XEPs added and updated in recent years and it turned into a modern protocol being able to provide all features you could expect from a modern messaging service. It's just that you need a client and server that supports those features. Daniel Gultsch has written an Android client[1], that's as good as it can be. He also offers a maintained XMPP server [2] providing the full-featured counterpart. But if you want to self-host, ejabberd supports all the features as does Prosody. For iOS users, there's Monal which is slowly getting there. [1] https://conversations.im https://conversations.im [2] https://account.conversations.im https://account.conversations.im

ryukafalz 6y ago
Needing a client that supports those features seems like a big ask, though. You're right that Conversations is about as good as an XMPP client can be, and it's a joy to use... but it's one of very few. Among other things, my server has message archiving configured for MUCs, but Conversations is the only client I've ever been able to get to sync that history locally. That's something I just don't ever have to worry about with Matrix. (Not that I don't have other complaints with Matrix.)
- mbirth 6y ago
  How many different full-featured Matrix clients do you know? And what about lean ones that don’t come in a huge Electron package? Also, Gajim has support for MAM and can sync everything locally. I believe Monal has it, too.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    Also not many, but they all get history syncing down. They have to, it's at the core of the protocol. (And that aside, at least Element is available on just about every platform.) Yes, I've heard that Gajim and Monal support it. I'm running both of them right now; Gajim doesn't appear to be fetching history from the server for the MUC I'm looking at in either the chat or history windows, Monal seems to attempt to but shows a progress spinner indefinitely. Conversations successfully loads history from the server; I can scroll back to well before I got this phone so I know it's not just local.