6 ms·

What happened with XMPP? Seems like the fragmentation of extensions kind of broke the client/server ecosystem, but the fundamentals seem solid, used by Whatsapp

What happened with XMPP? Seems like the fragmentation of extensions kind of broke the client/server ecosystem, but the fundamentals seem solid, used by Whatsapp successfully, but for some reason recent open messaging alternatives seem to decide to develop new protocols rather than build on top of XMPP.

bamboozled 4y ago
I wish it would come back , I really despise having 20 chat apps.
- stavros 4y ago
  I remember the good old days, when I had one client to talk to my friends, no matter which service they were on. The services themselves were a commodity, which I guess is exactly why this is no longer the case.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    It also wasn't difficult to set up your own server and bring your own domain, resulting in an easy to remember vanity handle like chat@lastname.tld. I hosted both prosody and ejabberd for years for friends and family, and it was orders of magnitude easier than self-hosting a mail server. Sadly, eventually everyone moved to proprietary platforms because file sending worked badly in those days, and mobile XMPP clients were simply terrible (no push notifications and such).
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    This is why I use my Matrix bridges. XMPP has bridges too, of course (that's what the Matrix bridges were inspired by) but it seems the "up and coming" status of Matrix helps the bridges be maintained better. FWIW, the EU has passed the Digital Markers Act which requires big tech companies to open up their platform. It'll take a while before it takes effect, but unless Apple, Google, Meta and all others are going the very expensive "fine me and we'll see what happens" route, we should soon see movement towards an environment where different apps can talk to each other again. The tech industry being what it is, there is no real standard for interoperability yet, though there is an IETF taskforce working on setting up a standard companies may follow: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/ This, critically, considers encrypted messages in a standard way so that we don't lose E2EE in the process.
    - stavros 4y ago
      Let's hope this ends up being good, I can see it taking twenty years and at some point standardizing a backend into the encryption :(
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  I really despise having 18 proprietary chat apps.
- courgette 4y ago
  Alternative are cropping up. I've been testing out solutions with other nerds. https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/ is promising. It's set of matrix bridge over 15 chat network or so. Neat.
  - pkulak 4y ago
    I've been successfully using their iMessage bridge for my personal server for about a year now. It's very nice to use iMessage on my Linux machines, since that's the chat network everyone around me has decided to use.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Is this in accordance with those services’ TOS? How can you be sure you won’t get banned? For instance, I remember hearing that Discord banned users who used alternative clients.
    - courgette 4y ago
      Good point. From my pov they can then shove their service up their ass but it’s a valid concern.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  20 feels like an exaggeration, but there are more than 20 Matrix bridges, so maybe I'm just less spread out than some. I've been using Telegram, Signal, Google Chat, and Discord so far, on a self-hosted server. It's not too hard to stand up, especially if you hang around here, and works a treat. Highly recommend if you want one app to message everyone from.
  - justusthane 4y ago
    +1 I just set up a Matrix homeserver for the first time, and it was really slick with the Ansible playbook. I am astonished by how well the Signal bridge works — everything works! Read indicators, threads, mentions, groups…so far I have it configured as a linked device to my phone, but you can also configure it as your primary device. I really want to use the WhatsApp bridge, but that seems messier. I don’t want to install WhatsApp on my phone, so it requires running Android in a VM with a VoIP number, and apparnetly risks getting banned from WhatsApp.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
andrius4669 4y ago
I've been using it comfortably for years now, what do you mean?
jonas-w 4y ago
I used xmpp for a while and it has a fairly good hosting experience (easy to setup and maintain) but it lacks good clients. At least clients that the typical whatsapp user would like. And now, that everyone pushes matrix as the best alternative to everything, the situation will likely not change.
- MattJ100 4y ago
  My family were WhatsApp users, and I moved the family-family chats from WhatsApp to Snikket (XMPP) a few years ago. They still have WhatsApp installed, but consider Snikket the go-to for reaching family members. It's not a WhatsApp clone, but they haven't struggled with it.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
What do you mean "what happened with XMPP"? Jabber uses XMPP.
- apetresc 4y ago
  But approximately nobody uses Jabber. He means, "why did XMPP fail to achieve the level of adoption it seemed poised to take a decade or two ago?"
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    If you use Cisco phones, you use Jabber.
    - biorach 4y ago
      Cisco makes phones?
      - justusthane 4y ago
        Yes, very widely used enterprise VoIP. Edit: At least in North America, can’t speak for the rest of the world.
      - smegger001 4y ago
        yes in fact they made iphones before apple. (apple stole the name and later licensed the trademark from cisco)
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        Have you literally never been in an office? They are probably the biggest manufacturer and supplier of telephony systems, at least in the UK. Well, since VoIP came along, anyway, before that it was all Nortel and BT Meridian, with the odd Avaya here and there. The VoIP server software they use supports XMPP natively so your softphone on your PC is just a Jabber client, and (as far as I've been told) they use XMPP to sync between servers. You've definitely used Cisco telephony kit, because you've definitely heard this tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pais41IW5dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pais41IW5dk
MattJ100 4y ago
The client/server ecosystem in XMPP is going strong. Fragmentation is no more of an issue in XMPP than any other open ecosystem. That's not to say it's easy to prevent things being fragmented in an open ecosystem, but it's something we try to stay on top of. For example, for some time now the XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes the "compliance suites" which detail for developers what up-to-date implementations are expected to be supporting. We recently updated the xmpp.org website to automatically calculate and display the compliance status of every project. This, for example, is not fragmentation: https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/screenshot-20230119-1674135510-20158.png https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/screenshot-20230119-167413... Monal's support for calls is in alpha builds, and they're hoping to release it in the coming months. Gajim (written in Python) is looking for someone to help them out with their audio/video call stack, which needs some attention. Servers (as in, actual deployments) are monitored via https://compliance.conversations.im/ https://compliance.conversations.im/ - which feeds into curated lists such as https://providers.xmpp.net/ https://providers.xmpp.net/
ilyt 4y ago
> Seems like the fragmentation of extensions kind of broke the client/server ecosystem It did. It was bigger and bigger mess, which feature in which client was supported by what server. I still remember how spotty basic stuff (nowadays) like "send file to someone" was. And then corporations happened. There was a brief beautiful period of time where you could just put up your XMPP server and chat both with Google and Facebook users directly, but companies figured out closing down their gardens is more profitable and it was no longer the case > but for some reason recent open messaging alternatives seem to decide to develop new protocols rather than build on top of XMPP. Coz it is a fucking mess of XEPs spottily implemented between clients and servers, and not always that user friendly. If you can control server, protocol and client you can just implement stuff. You don't need to make a spec, hope other people's client implement it, start using it in your server, and hope everyone else agrees on it too. And you can just deprecate stuff that turned out to not work well, or just need to be done differently. Frankly, XEPs shouldn't exist. There should be just XMPP 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc. with maybe optional "XMPP voice comms", "XMPP video comms" pack of features (for those cases where full voice/video chat is not relevant). You either implement all or are noncompliant, no more "well, you send a message but target client doesn't support this XEP, they get garbage"
- MattJ100 4y ago
  Breaking the existing deployed network every time a new feature is added is unfortunately not a solution for an open ecosystem. While there are obviously limits to how far backwards compatibility should go, it doesn't make sense to deny users basic messaging just because their app doesn't implement calls for example. That would just cause a different set of frustrations. I wrote a bit about this dichotomy in this blog post a couple of years ago: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > Breaking the existing deployed network every time a new feature is added is unfortunately not a solution for an open ecosystem. I didn't say it but yes, the support for old version for some time would need to be a thing. But it should be defined (say "3 years for last minor release of every version") so it can be planned for > While there are obviously limits to how far backwards compatibility should go, it doesn't make sense to deny users basic messaging just because their app doesn't implement calls for example. That would just cause a different set of frustrations. As you clearly didn't bother to read before you answered, here is what I mentioned in comment you didn't bother to read before answering > with maybe optional "XMPP voice comms", "XMPP video comms" pack of features (for those cases where full voice/video chat is not relevant). I don't argue for single version, but to very small subset of featuresets instead of sea of XEPs
rakoo 4y ago
> What happened with XMPP? There never was meaningful money behind it. It seems the only way a protocol can ever grow today is by having for-profit companies sponsoring its development, doing the marketing, pushing it to individuals, companies and public services. That's not too hard to understand: at some point you need people working on it, and in a capitalistic society you need to pay them, and thus you need to somehow make money. Even with all the goodwill and proper licenses and all, you need massive humanpower. Google, Whatsapp, Fcaebook all used a form of XMPP but never intended to propel it as a federated protocol, only for their own usage.
- amysox 4y ago
  Well, I can't say we didn't try. I remember how excited my boss, Andre, was when he discovered the Jabber protocol. He convinced Webb Interactive to spin off Jabber.com as a subsidiary, and I went with him. Our first space was the former office of Webb's chairman, with four of us in there. Later, when the company moved from Glenarm Street to Wynkoop Street, we had part of the floor above Webb's floor. I spent a lot of time working on the bridge from Jabber to ICQ, which was always kind of touchy. And we did have a nice booth at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey. Then came the dot-com crash, and Andre was forced to lay off a bunch of people, including me. He didn't want to do it; I think he was as much in tears as I was. Eventually, I understand, Jabber.com was bought by Cisco. And Webb Interactive eventually kind of sputtered out. I had some rough times, but I'm doing a lot better now after a bunch of other job moves (not to mention a gender transition). Andre's got Ping Identity now, and he's finally having the kind of success he deserves.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    Oh I'm sure some companies did try, and probably even deserved success, but like all businesses there's always a question of chance involved. Maybe your company was too early to the game, trying to push computer communications when not enough people used computers in the first place; I don't know. But I would have loved to have had a proper communication protocol 10 years ago instead of doing the same thing over and over and over again, even today.
jerf 4y ago
"recent open messaging alternatives seem to decide to develop new protocols rather than build on top of XMPP" XMPP is reasonably specifically a protocol for Instant Messaging. You can theoretically do whatever you want with it, and you can theoretically turn it into a mechanism for delivering social-networking style asynchronous messaging, but it doesn't necessarily bring a lot of value, and it makes a certain amount of fundamental architecture decisions that aren't necessarily the best for a social network. I am interpreting your "recent open messaging alternatives" in the social network framework because my perception is the major ones you might be thinking about are those things, like Mastodon and such. I'm not aware of hot new open IM protocols that are just "old school" IM.
- 3np 4y ago
  They're probably referring more to Matrix, which does have a somewhat different scope.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  What makes something like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, et al not fall into your definition? That seems to be what the parent commenter has in mind far more than Mastodon, at least to me.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Not what I would personally consider "recent". Your mileage will vary; there is no objective definition of that.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      I would argue since the comparison is XMPP, which has been around for almost a quarter of a century, “recent” has a slightly wider definition than most times.
seba_dos1 4y ago
Nothing. It experienced some stagnation around the time Google ditched it for Hangouts, but it's been going strong again for years now.
lmm 4y ago
It was a terrible pile of overengineered sophomoric semantic-nonsense second-system effect garbage from day 1. The need for everything to be an extension and XML was a millstone around every client and server's neck, the XML validation is directly blamed for the downfall of Google Wave but it also seems like that drag was the primary reason why the client experience always sucked. The reason the only successful uses of XMPP are in closed ecosystems isn't nefarious companies trying to control it (although there are those), it's because the only way you can actually get a reliably compatible experience for the kind of rich chat that everyone expects these days is if you control the clients and servers together. I genuinely think the main reason there are no successful open-source chat apps is that XMPP dragged them all down.

bamboozled 4y ago

I wish it would come back , I really despise having 20 chat apps.

stavros 4y ago
I remember the good old days, when I had one client to talk to my friends, no matter which service they were on. The services themselves were a commodity, which I guess is exactly why this is no longer the case.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  It also wasn't difficult to set up your own server and bring your own domain, resulting in an easy to remember vanity handle like chat@lastname.tld. I hosted both prosody and ejabberd for years for friends and family, and it was orders of magnitude easier than self-hosting a mail server. Sadly, eventually everyone moved to proprietary platforms because file sending worked badly in those days, and mobile XMPP clients were simply terrible (no push notifications and such).
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  This is why I use my Matrix bridges. XMPP has bridges too, of course (that's what the Matrix bridges were inspired by) but it seems the "up and coming" status of Matrix helps the bridges be maintained better. FWIW, the EU has passed the Digital Markers Act which requires big tech companies to open up their platform. It'll take a while before it takes effect, but unless Apple, Google, Meta and all others are going the very expensive "fine me and we'll see what happens" route, we should soon see movement towards an environment where different apps can talk to each other again. The tech industry being what it is, there is no real standard for interoperability yet, though there is an IETF taskforce working on setting up a standard companies may follow: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/ This, critically, considers encrypted messages in a standard way so that we don't lose E2EE in the process.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Let's hope this ends up being good, I can see it taking twenty years and at some point standardizing a backend into the encryption :(
nicolaslem 4y ago
I really despise having 18 proprietary chat apps.
courgette 4y ago
Alternative are cropping up. I've been testing out solutions with other nerds. https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/ is promising. It's set of matrix bridge over 15 chat network or so. Neat.
- pkulak 4y ago
  I've been successfully using their iMessage bridge for my personal server for about a year now. It's very nice to use iMessage on my Linux machines, since that's the chat network everyone around me has decided to use.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Is this in accordance with those services’ TOS? How can you be sure you won’t get banned? For instance, I remember hearing that Discord banned users who used alternative clients.
  - courgette 4y ago
    Good point. From my pov they can then shove their service up their ass but it’s a valid concern.
29083011397778 4y ago
20 feels like an exaggeration, but there are more than 20 Matrix bridges, so maybe I'm just less spread out than some. I've been using Telegram, Signal, Google Chat, and Discord so far, on a self-hosted server. It's not too hard to stand up, especially if you hang around here, and works a treat. Highly recommend if you want one app to message everyone from.
- justusthane 4y ago
  +1 I just set up a Matrix homeserver for the first time, and it was really slick with the Ansible playbook. I am astonished by how well the Signal bridge works — everything works! Read indicators, threads, mentions, groups…so far I have it configured as a linked device to my phone, but you can also configure it as your primary device. I really want to use the WhatsApp bridge, but that seems messier. I don’t want to install WhatsApp on my phone, so it requires running Android in a VM with a VoIP number, and apparnetly risks getting banned from WhatsApp.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

andrius4669 4y ago

I've been using it comfortably for years now, what do you mean?

jonas-w 4y ago

I used xmpp for a while and it has a fairly good hosting experience (easy to setup and maintain) but it lacks good clients. At least clients that the typical whatsapp user would like. And now, that everyone pushes matrix as the best alternative to everything, the situation will likely not change.

MattJ100 4y ago
My family were WhatsApp users, and I moved the family-family chats from WhatsApp to Snikket (XMPP) a few years ago. They still have WhatsApp installed, but consider Snikket the go-to for reaching family members. It's not a WhatsApp clone, but they haven't struggled with it.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

What do you mean "what happened with XMPP"? Jabber uses XMPP.

apetresc 4y ago
But approximately nobody uses Jabber. He means, "why did XMPP fail to achieve the level of adoption it seemed poised to take a decade or two ago?"
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  If you use Cisco phones, you use Jabber.
  - biorach 4y ago
    Cisco makes phones?
    - justusthane 4y ago
      Yes, very widely used enterprise VoIP. Edit: At least in North America, can’t speak for the rest of the world.
    - smegger001 4y ago
      yes in fact they made iphones before apple. (apple stole the name and later licensed the trademark from cisco)
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      Have you literally never been in an office? They are probably the biggest manufacturer and supplier of telephony systems, at least in the UK. Well, since VoIP came along, anyway, before that it was all Nortel and BT Meridian, with the odd Avaya here and there. The VoIP server software they use supports XMPP natively so your softphone on your PC is just a Jabber client, and (as far as I've been told) they use XMPP to sync between servers. You've definitely used Cisco telephony kit, because you've definitely heard this tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pais41IW5dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pais41IW5dk

MattJ100 4y ago

The client/server ecosystem in XMPP is going strong. Fragmentation is no more of an issue in XMPP than any other open ecosystem. That's not to say it's easy to prevent things being fragmented in an open ecosystem, but it's something we try to stay on top of. For example, for some time now the XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes the "compliance suites" which detail for developers what up-to-date implementations are expected to be supporting. We recently updated the xmpp.org website to automatically calculate and display the compliance status of every project. This, for example, is not fragmentation: https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/screenshot-20230119-1674135510-20158.png https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/screenshot-20230119-167413... Monal's support for calls is in alpha builds, and they're hoping to release it in the coming months. Gajim (written in Python) is looking for someone to help them out with their audio/video call stack, which needs some attention. Servers (as in, actual deployments) are monitored via https://compliance.conversations.im/ https://compliance.conversations.im/ - which feeds into curated lists such as https://providers.xmpp.net/ https://providers.xmpp.net/

ilyt 4y ago

> Seems like the fragmentation of extensions kind of broke the client/server ecosystem It did. It was bigger and bigger mess, which feature in which client was supported by what server. I still remember how spotty basic stuff (nowadays) like "send file to someone" was. And then corporations happened. There was a brief beautiful period of time where you could just put up your XMPP server and chat both with Google and Facebook users directly, but companies figured out closing down their gardens is more profitable and it was no longer the case > but for some reason recent open messaging alternatives seem to decide to develop new protocols rather than build on top of XMPP. Coz it is a fucking mess of XEPs spottily implemented between clients and servers, and not always that user friendly. If you can control server, protocol and client you can just implement stuff. You don't need to make a spec, hope other people's client implement it, start using it in your server, and hope everyone else agrees on it too. And you can just deprecate stuff that turned out to not work well, or just need to be done differently. Frankly, XEPs shouldn't exist. There should be just XMPP 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc. with maybe optional "XMPP voice comms", "XMPP video comms" pack of features (for those cases where full voice/video chat is not relevant). You either implement all or are noncompliant, no more "well, you send a message but target client doesn't support this XEP, they get garbage"

MattJ100 4y ago
Breaking the existing deployed network every time a new feature is added is unfortunately not a solution for an open ecosystem. While there are obviously limits to how far backwards compatibility should go, it doesn't make sense to deny users basic messaging just because their app doesn't implement calls for example. That would just cause a different set of frustrations. I wrote a bit about this dichotomy in this blog post a couple of years ago: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Breaking the existing deployed network every time a new feature is added is unfortunately not a solution for an open ecosystem. I didn't say it but yes, the support for old version for some time would need to be a thing. But it should be defined (say "3 years for last minor release of every version") so it can be planned for > While there are obviously limits to how far backwards compatibility should go, it doesn't make sense to deny users basic messaging just because their app doesn't implement calls for example. That would just cause a different set of frustrations. As you clearly didn't bother to read before you answered, here is what I mentioned in comment you didn't bother to read before answering > with maybe optional "XMPP voice comms", "XMPP video comms" pack of features (for those cases where full voice/video chat is not relevant). I don't argue for single version, but to very small subset of featuresets instead of sea of XEPs

rakoo 4y ago

> What happened with XMPP? There never was meaningful money behind it. It seems the only way a protocol can ever grow today is by having for-profit companies sponsoring its development, doing the marketing, pushing it to individuals, companies and public services. That's not too hard to understand: at some point you need people working on it, and in a capitalistic society you need to pay them, and thus you need to somehow make money. Even with all the goodwill and proper licenses and all, you need massive humanpower. Google, Whatsapp, Fcaebook all used a form of XMPP but never intended to propel it as a federated protocol, only for their own usage.

amysox 4y ago
Well, I can't say we didn't try. I remember how excited my boss, Andre, was when he discovered the Jabber protocol. He convinced Webb Interactive to spin off Jabber.com as a subsidiary, and I went with him. Our first space was the former office of Webb's chairman, with four of us in there. Later, when the company moved from Glenarm Street to Wynkoop Street, we had part of the floor above Webb's floor. I spent a lot of time working on the bridge from Jabber to ICQ, which was always kind of touchy. And we did have a nice booth at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey. Then came the dot-com crash, and Andre was forced to lay off a bunch of people, including me. He didn't want to do it; I think he was as much in tears as I was. Eventually, I understand, Jabber.com was bought by Cisco. And Webb Interactive eventually kind of sputtered out. I had some rough times, but I'm doing a lot better now after a bunch of other job moves (not to mention a gender transition). Andre's got Ping Identity now, and he's finally having the kind of success he deserves.
- rakoo 4y ago
  Oh I'm sure some companies did try, and probably even deserved success, but like all businesses there's always a question of chance involved. Maybe your company was too early to the game, trying to push computer communications when not enough people used computers in the first place; I don't know. But I would have loved to have had a proper communication protocol 10 years ago instead of doing the same thing over and over and over again, even today.

jerf 4y ago

"recent open messaging alternatives seem to decide to develop new protocols rather than build on top of XMPP" XMPP is reasonably specifically a protocol for Instant Messaging. You can theoretically do whatever you want with it, and you can theoretically turn it into a mechanism for delivering social-networking style asynchronous messaging, but it doesn't necessarily bring a lot of value, and it makes a certain amount of fundamental architecture decisions that aren't necessarily the best for a social network. I am interpreting your "recent open messaging alternatives" in the social network framework because my perception is the major ones you might be thinking about are those things, like Mastodon and such. I'm not aware of hot new open IM protocols that are just "old school" IM.

3np 4y ago
They're probably referring more to Matrix, which does have a somewhat different scope.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
What makes something like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, et al not fall into your definition? That seems to be what the parent commenter has in mind far more than Mastodon, at least to me.
- jerf 4y ago
  Not what I would personally consider "recent". Your mileage will vary; there is no objective definition of that.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    I would argue since the comparison is XMPP, which has been around for almost a quarter of a century, “recent” has a slightly wider definition than most times.

seba_dos1 4y ago

Nothing. It experienced some stagnation around the time Google ditched it for Hangouts, but it's been going strong again for years now.

lmm 4y ago

It was a terrible pile of overengineered sophomoric semantic-nonsense second-system effect garbage from day 1. The need for everything to be an extension and XML was a millstone around every client and server's neck, the XML validation is directly blamed for the downfall of Google Wave but it also seems like that drag was the primary reason why the client experience always sucked. The reason the only successful uses of XMPP are in closed ecosystems isn't nefarious companies trying to control it (although there are those), it's because the only way you can actually get a reliably compatible experience for the kind of rich chat that everyone expects these days is if you control the clients and servers together. I genuinely think the main reason there are no successful open-source chat apps is that XMPP dragged them all down.