4 ms·

This is a dumb questions, please excuse the ignorance: Why were/are there not (or are there?) adapters so that you can speak whatever protocol you prefer (smtp,

by verelo 4y ago

This is a dumb questions, please excuse the ignorance: Why were/are there not (or are there?) adapters so that you can speak whatever protocol you prefer (smtp, xmpp x.400 etc) but it still gets through to the user on the other end?

zokier 4y ago
XMPP has explicit support for "transports"/"gateways" for that purpose, so you could plug in AIM/ICQ/whatev support into your XMPP server. See https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html for example. IRC has bitlbee (and probably others) to fulfill that role https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html Matrix has "bridges" to interop with other protocols https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
metajack 4y ago
There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.
MattJ100 4y ago
That's exactly what XMPP was originally created for - a single open protocol that would let you interface with all the others. But it's very hard, technically, to maintain interfaces to a changing set of evolving third-party protocols, and provide a good user experience. Especially if those people don't want you bridging to them. Open networks tend to fare better in the long term, but generally the user experience of an app bespoke for the target protocol is nearly always better.

4 ms·

This is a dumb questions, please excuse the ignorance: Why were/are there not (or are there?) adapters so that you can speak whatever protocol you prefer (smtp,

by verelo 4y ago

zokier 4y ago
XMPP has explicit support for "transports"/"gateways" for that purpose, so you could plug in AIM/ICQ/whatev support into your XMPP server. See https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html for example. IRC has bitlbee (and probably others) to fulfill that role https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html Matrix has "bridges" to interop with other protocols https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
metajack 4y ago
There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.
MattJ100 4y ago
That's exactly what XMPP was originally created for - a single open protocol that would let you interface with all the others. But it's very hard, technically, to maintain interfaces to a changing set of evolving third-party protocols, and provide a good user experience. Especially if those people don't want you bridging to them. Open networks tend to fare better in the long term, but generally the user experience of an app bespoke for the target protocol is nearly always better.