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> When you are establishing a standard that clients and servers will advertise that they adhere to, don't leave technical decisions to the end-user by default.

by Lammy 5y ago

> When you are establishing a standard that clients and servers will advertise that they adhere to, don't leave technical decisions to the end-user by default. On principle I agree, but ironically the exact scenario you suggest was the single biggest event that "killed" XMPP as we used to know it. In late 2013 there was an XMPP community manifesto calling for mandatory TLS (even STARTTLS) for XMPP server-to-server communication by a drop-dead date in early 2014: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.txt https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t... "The schedule we agree to is: - January 4, 2014: first test day requiring encryption - February 22, 2014: second test day - March 22, 2014: third test day - April 19, 2014: fourth test day - May 19, 2014: permanent upgrade to encrypted network, coinciding with Open Discussion Day <http://opendiscussionday.org/ http://opendiscussionday.org/>" Well-intentioned for sure, but the one XMPP provider with an actual critical mass of users (Google Talk) remained non-TLS-only, all Google Talk users dropped off the federated XMPP network after May 2014, and so XMPP effectively ceased to matter.

MattJ100 5y ago
In fairness, by 2014 it was fairly obvious that Google was no longer interested in furthering Google Talk. It was about the time that they were pushing folk to Google+ and Hangouts. Google's XMPP server continued to accept unencrypted connections for many years after this point. I think the XMPP operators made the right choice, rather than letting Google weaken the security of the entire network.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > by 2014 it was fairly obvious that Google was no longer interested in furthering Google Talk Definitely, but I think it was a huge PR failure that we in the XMPP community were the ones to sever the conversational link. Users shouldn't be expected to think about the protocol details, hence this thread, and it was an XMPP community decision that resulted in people being suddenly unable to talk to their friends. We provided perfect justification for any Google project manager to look at the stats and see zero incoming s2s connections as justification to kill Talk entirely so they could Move Fast™ on Hangouts or whatever. I guarantee we pushed more overall XMPP users to WhatsApp/FB than we pushed Google Talk users to privacy-first XMPP hosts since it's not like Google popped up any alert in the GMail Talk UI explaining to people why their nerd friends all suddenly vanished from their buddy lists. The moment any of those people used a non-XMPP service to reach out and ask "What's up?" we had already lost :/

by Lammy 5y ago

MattJ100 5y ago

In fairness, by 2014 it was fairly obvious that Google was no longer interested in furthering Google Talk. It was about the time that they were pushing folk to Google+ and Hangouts. Google's XMPP server continued to accept unencrypted connections for many years after this point. I think the XMPP operators made the right choice, rather than letting Google weaken the security of the entire network.

Lammy 5y ago
> by 2014 it was fairly obvious that Google was no longer interested in furthering Google Talk Definitely, but I think it was a huge PR failure that we in the XMPP community were the ones to sever the conversational link. Users shouldn't be expected to think about the protocol details, hence this thread, and it was an XMPP community decision that resulted in people being suddenly unable to talk to their friends. We provided perfect justification for any Google project manager to look at the stats and see zero incoming s2s connections as justification to kill Talk entirely so they could Move Fast™ on Hangouts or whatever. I guarantee we pushed more overall XMPP users to WhatsApp/FB than we pushed Google Talk users to privacy-first XMPP hosts since it's not like Google popped up any alert in the GMail Talk UI explaining to people why their nerd friends all suddenly vanished from their buddy lists. The moment any of those people used a non-XMPP service to reach out and ask "What's up?" we had already lost :/