4 ms·

SMTP achieved critical mass before the age of modern startups / companies. All of these federated protocols: XMPP and even Mastodon to an extent, are smaller g

SMTP achieved critical mass before the age of modern startups / companies. All of these federated protocols: XMPP and even Mastodon to an extent, are smaller groups of humble nerds running instances. They aren't massively advertised, large-scale billion dollars of investment companies like Discord or Facebook, trying to build network effects and/or advertising revenue. ----------- When competing against profitable companies, its not sufficient to merely exist. You're competing against advertising and eyeballs. Facebook is big because its big, because it advertises, because it is constantly pushing for more-and-more users. Same with Twitter, same with Discord. This leads to little advantages: a $10-million+ UI overhaul every few years. Designers to simplify the interface and onboard faster. Paying Google/Apple absurd amounts of money to access the push-notification APIs on phones. Etc. etc. Smaller XMPP instances already fail at the push-notification thing. Who will pay for that? And without push-notifications, do you really have a modern chat platform? Other companies can afford the costs.

MattJ100 4y ago
For the record, access to push notification APIs only needs to be done by the developer of the app the users are using. Small servers never need to communicate with Apple/Google themselves - any necessary notifications are routed through a gateway operated by the app's developer (which is also necessary because only the app developer is given the API keys and permissions to send push notifications to their app). At the time of writing this, 90% of 363 tested XMPP domains support push notifications. I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, mind. There is lots to compete with, and due to the lack of a good business case for open networks, most XMPP projects are by open-source volunteers and the majority of public XMPP services are similarly operated by volunteers. There do exist projects with funding though, and there are multiple companies actively engaged in paid XMPP projects and deployments. But these all tend to happen behind closed doors, they're typically not deployments for the general public, or the XMPP is quietly under the hood of a larger service/product (such as happened in Zoom, WhatsApp, and many online games such as EVE and Fortnite).
- NonEUCitizen 4y ago
  Is there a publicly available report of this test of 363 XMPP domains? Thank you.
  - MattJ100 4y ago
    Yes, you can view this and other results at https://compliance.conversations.im/tests/ https://compliance.conversations.im/tests/

MattJ100 4y ago

For the record, access to push notification APIs only needs to be done by the developer of the app the users are using. Small servers never need to communicate with Apple/Google themselves - any necessary notifications are routed through a gateway operated by the app's developer (which is also necessary because only the app developer is given the API keys and permissions to send push notifications to their app). At the time of writing this, 90% of 363 tested XMPP domains support push notifications. I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, mind. There is lots to compete with, and due to the lack of a good business case for open networks, most XMPP projects are by open-source volunteers and the majority of public XMPP services are similarly operated by volunteers. There do exist projects with funding though, and there are multiple companies actively engaged in paid XMPP projects and deployments. But these all tend to happen behind closed doors, they're typically not deployments for the general public, or the XMPP is quietly under the hood of a larger service/product (such as happened in Zoom, WhatsApp, and many online games such as EVE and Fortnite).

NonEUCitizen 4y ago
Is there a publicly available report of this test of 363 XMPP domains? Thank you.
- MattJ100 4y ago
  Yes, you can view this and other results at https://compliance.conversations.im/tests/ https://compliance.conversations.im/tests/