7 ms·

I miss the "golden age" of chat where I could talk to anyone (google/fb/msn messenger/aol?) with my own jabber server. Pidgin was a great client at the time.

I miss the "golden age" of chat where I could talk to anyone (google/fb/msn messenger/aol?) with my own jabber server. Pidgin was a great client at the time. I've been looking for a modern self-hosted chat solution. I want it to be XMPP so badly (running XMPP with something like prosody is so convenient). The clients are really letting me down though. Desktop clients are old-fashioned and awful (I could get behind that, but I don't think my kids could). The mobile situation is even worse. The new-fangled chat solutions (Matrix, Zulip, etc.) are interesting, but the operational requirements are insane (in the case of Matrix, I'm also very nervous about reliability). I can't say I'm super hopeful, but I'm rooting for you, XMPP.

oezi 5y ago
This golden aged failed when it missed the boat to go mobile. Ridiculous to think that none of the messengers from this time could envision to sync with the mobile phone's address book. I don't think we would have WhatsApp or Signal if any of the desktop chats had allowed that.
- l72 5y ago
  The Palm Pre actually had a really nice mobile messenger. It synced with Address Book, supported SMS, Jabber, Facebook Messenger (back when it was jabber), aim, and others. It would seamlessly switch protocols based on how the contact messaged you. Like most things with the Pre, it was way ahead of its time.
- Groxx 5y ago
  Arguably, they were killed by the mobile platform-owners. Sending push notifications, which is broadly necessary for achieving both performance and battery efficiency, has been strictly centralized and locked down (understandably, I'd hate to try to block abuse if I were running it). Federated systems with multiple apps were pushed out because there was no sane way to achieve that with the push architecture, and that's still the case. You see the same thing with nearly any third-party app, they're nearly always partly-crippled experiences because the first-party will not send push notifications to anything but their own app.
  - toast0 5y ago
    You absolutely need push on iOS and modern Android. S60 and Android before doze didn't because you could just have a connection in the background; afaik, BlackBerry didn't restrict background data either. But it's not like there was a lot of good mobile XMPP clients that died out when push became mandatory. If there was, it wouldn't take much to make an XMPP extension or three for the client to provide a push url to the server. Client devs would (probably) need to standup a push proxy, so xmpp server pushes to client server pushes to client, because I don't think many platforms give out push urls that can be securely passed on to 3rd parties. There's some expense there, but not a whole lot, IMHO.
    - dinosaurdynasty 5y ago
      XEP-0357: Push Notifications <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html> has been a thing for while. A lot of servers support it too: <https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0357/ https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0357/>.
  - thombles 5y ago
    While a lamentable situation, this has been addressed to a considerable degree and it's not all that bad. For example Matrix has its Push Gateway API (https://matrix.org/docs/spec/push_gateway/r0.1.1#id4 https://matrix.org/docs/spec/push_gateway/r0.1.1#id4) which allows any client to register any kind of push service. This means that any given iOS app, for example, can maintain its own backend for feeding events into APNs like Apple requires. I'm not as familiar with it but I believe XEP-0357 does something similar.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Nah, they were killed by XMPP's braindead protocol design that made it useless for multiple clients. Apparently the idea that people might want to read messages on both their phone and computer, or on two computers, was completely unimaginable for XMPP, despite every other messaging system doing the sensible thing. Eventually there was an XEP ("Message Carbons") to give the basic sensible functionality, and eventually eventually most servers more or less supported it and it more or less worked most of the time, but that killed XMPP on mobile long before push notification platforms were even a thing.
- miohtama 5y ago
  It also failed because of this > Signup for an XMPP service anonymously Unmoderated networks quickly degenerate spam pits from Hell. It worked in 90s when everyone was still polite in Internet.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    People weren't polite on the internet in the 90s! There was plenty of trolls even back then. Plenty of spam too. I'm ashamed to admit this but I even wrote software what ran on Windows 95 and would spam chat rooms with thousands of phrases generated on the fly from a dictionary. The intention was it would run over a RAT (also of my creation) and get other people booted off the chat room. ie the spam would be posted by other people in chat rooms against their will and channel admins would then kick them. I wrote this because at college we "only" had dual ISDN lines and kids in chat rooms would slow down my warez downloads. I know, I know, the justification is worse than the tool itself. But we were young, I've grown up since and these days the lessons I've learned from my college exploits are put to good use :)
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  > This golden aged failed when it missed the boat to go mobile. There were plenty of mobile applications that supported multiple chat protocols. There might even still be. The issue is proprietary protocols would often change breaking support -- I suspect intentionally breaking support for 3rd party client. Linux / Unix nerds running FOSS would be tolerant of that but I suspect your average smart phone user who might have spent 99c on the client would be less understanding.
icedchai 5y ago
Too bad AIM went away. AOL should've open sourced it. In the early 2000's, several companies I worked for used AIM like we use Slack today.
- sydbarrett74 5y ago
  When I did tech support in the early 2000's, we used the corporate version of ICQ for internal communications. It actually served quite well.
topdancing 5y ago
dino.im is the new up and coming desktop client. I have a few friends that are using Gajim on Windows. kaidan.im is also a new KDE client.
- xiaomai 5y ago
  dino.im is very promising, It's a little buggy right now and missing features, but I love the approach.
FerretFred 5y ago
The clients are really letting me down though Yeah! I ran my own XMPP server on my home network and used it to accept status messages from other boxes on my network. Worked really well. The clients were generally horrible though, especially the IOS ones. I've now switched to MQTT.

oezi 5y ago

This golden aged failed when it missed the boat to go mobile. Ridiculous to think that none of the messengers from this time could envision to sync with the mobile phone's address book. I don't think we would have WhatsApp or Signal if any of the desktop chats had allowed that.

l72 5y ago
The Palm Pre actually had a really nice mobile messenger. It synced with Address Book, supported SMS, Jabber, Facebook Messenger (back when it was jabber), aim, and others. It would seamlessly switch protocols based on how the contact messaged you. Like most things with the Pre, it was way ahead of its time.
Groxx 5y ago
Arguably, they were killed by the mobile platform-owners. Sending push notifications, which is broadly necessary for achieving both performance and battery efficiency, has been strictly centralized and locked down (understandably, I'd hate to try to block abuse if I were running it). Federated systems with multiple apps were pushed out because there was no sane way to achieve that with the push architecture, and that's still the case. You see the same thing with nearly any third-party app, they're nearly always partly-crippled experiences because the first-party will not send push notifications to anything but their own app.
- toast0 5y ago
  You absolutely need push on iOS and modern Android. S60 and Android before doze didn't because you could just have a connection in the background; afaik, BlackBerry didn't restrict background data either. But it's not like there was a lot of good mobile XMPP clients that died out when push became mandatory. If there was, it wouldn't take much to make an XMPP extension or three for the client to provide a push url to the server. Client devs would (probably) need to standup a push proxy, so xmpp server pushes to client server pushes to client, because I don't think many platforms give out push urls that can be securely passed on to 3rd parties. There's some expense there, but not a whole lot, IMHO.
  - dinosaurdynasty 5y ago
    XEP-0357: Push Notifications <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html> has been a thing for while. A lot of servers support it too: <https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0357/ https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0357/>.
- thombles 5y ago
  While a lamentable situation, this has been addressed to a considerable degree and it's not all that bad. For example Matrix has its Push Gateway API (https://matrix.org/docs/spec/push_gateway/r0.1.1#id4 https://matrix.org/docs/spec/push_gateway/r0.1.1#id4) which allows any client to register any kind of push service. This means that any given iOS app, for example, can maintain its own backend for feeding events into APNs like Apple requires. I'm not as familiar with it but I believe XEP-0357 does something similar.
- lmm 5y ago
  Nah, they were killed by XMPP's braindead protocol design that made it useless for multiple clients. Apparently the idea that people might want to read messages on both their phone and computer, or on two computers, was completely unimaginable for XMPP, despite every other messaging system doing the sensible thing. Eventually there was an XEP ("Message Carbons") to give the basic sensible functionality, and eventually eventually most servers more or less supported it and it more or less worked most of the time, but that killed XMPP on mobile long before push notification platforms were even a thing.
miohtama 5y ago
It also failed because of this > Signup for an XMPP service anonymously Unmoderated networks quickly degenerate spam pits from Hell. It worked in 90s when everyone was still polite in Internet.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  People weren't polite on the internet in the 90s! There was plenty of trolls even back then. Plenty of spam too. I'm ashamed to admit this but I even wrote software what ran on Windows 95 and would spam chat rooms with thousands of phrases generated on the fly from a dictionary. The intention was it would run over a RAT (also of my creation) and get other people booted off the chat room. ie the spam would be posted by other people in chat rooms against their will and channel admins would then kick them. I wrote this because at college we "only" had dual ISDN lines and kids in chat rooms would slow down my warez downloads. I know, I know, the justification is worse than the tool itself. But we were young, I've grown up since and these days the lessons I've learned from my college exploits are put to good use :)
hnlmorg 5y ago
> This golden aged failed when it missed the boat to go mobile. There were plenty of mobile applications that supported multiple chat protocols. There might even still be. The issue is proprietary protocols would often change breaking support -- I suspect intentionally breaking support for 3rd party client. Linux / Unix nerds running FOSS would be tolerant of that but I suspect your average smart phone user who might have spent 99c on the client would be less understanding.

icedchai 5y ago

Too bad AIM went away. AOL should've open sourced it. In the early 2000's, several companies I worked for used AIM like we use Slack today.

sydbarrett74 5y ago
When I did tech support in the early 2000's, we used the corporate version of ICQ for internal communications. It actually served quite well.

topdancing 5y ago

dino.im is the new up and coming desktop client. I have a few friends that are using Gajim on Windows. kaidan.im is also a new KDE client.

xiaomai 5y ago
dino.im is very promising, It's a little buggy right now and missing features, but I love the approach.

FerretFred 5y ago

The clients are really letting me down though Yeah! I ran my own XMPP server on my home network and used it to accept status messages from other boxes on my network. Worked really well. The clients were generally horrible though, especially the IOS ones. I've now switched to MQTT.