4 ms·

Anything that's not XMPP or based on it is inferior, IMO. And I'm not saying that for the troll (although it's easy to be dogmatic about such things). Facts are

by ezst 3y ago

Anything that's not XMPP or based on it is inferior, IMO. And I'm not saying that for the troll (although it's easy to be dogmatic about such things). Facts are XMPP has awesome server implementations that scale to billions of users (as proven by WhatsApp/ejabberd), and developing new clients is made easy by the sheer number of libraries and platforms supported. XMPP is an established IETF standard that has a compact core and extensibility in mind (so you can remain compatible across a large spectrum of users and use cases while rolling out new and unique features). Because it's federated, it's resilient against most types of monopolistic abuses (as seen with slack and other venture capital endeavors). I would only consider P2P and other federated protocols to be worthy of my (peers) time, but I also haven't seen anything else out there that would make me want to leave the comfort of XMPP and my self hosted instance.

aidenn0 3y ago
It's been a while, but I seem to recall group chats being a bit unwieldy in XMPP. Other issue with XMPP is how hard it is to find clients that don't suck (particularly if you want to interop; I think I've seen at least 3 different ways clients implemented emojis, for example).
- ezst 3y ago
  Group chats work pretty well in my experience. The spec for MUC is rather large even though only a small portion of it is used in practice (the roles/ACL capabilities go way beyond that of other protocols, probably inheriting the requirements of large-scale government/corporate deployments). There were also some challenges early-on relating to mobile use-cases (e.g. how to notify/respond to a user who's not joined to the group chat because their client is offline), and XMPP has grown a set of extensions in that area (push notifications, stream resumption, …). > Other issue with XMPP is how hard it is to find clients that don't suck OK, but the alternative we are talking about here consists of developing the server, protocol and clients all at once and from scratch, and end-up with something that's merely a prototype heading into a decade worth of enhancement and scalability improvements, iteratively bumping into the exact same kind of problems. Wouldn't it be less effort to just make an XMPP client that doesn't suck and lead by example? (That's pretty much what the "Conversations" Android client did when it came out, and now it's used by the German government, among others). > I think I've seen at least 3 different ways clients implemented emojis, for example I'm not aware of anything like that. There are different ways to do certain things, like sending attachments (HTTP upload or client-to-client), but that's the good thing about XMPP: your client/server negotiate capabilities and sometimes even translate among them. I won't pretend that everything is rosy, for sure, but it also isn't that bad.
tredre3 3y ago
Whatsapp succeeded with XMPP because they defined a superset and their only client implements 100% of it. This isn't applicable to XMPP at large at all. I tried getting E2EE working. There are 3 standards. Some clients implement one or two of them. Some clients none. It's a nightmare to get them to talk together. Then you have all the other 400 XEPs that may or may not be implemented by clients. Things like file transfer, typing indicator, video chat, avatars, group chats. The only way XMPP becomes relevant again is if they choose a subset of REQUIRED features and clients must implement them all to be considered XMPP2-compatible.
- Zash 3y ago
  Such a subset exists already: https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/ https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    That's great. Probably too late to make an impact (And I say this as someone who uses XMPP regularly), but I would have killed for something like that 10 years ago. Weeding through clients was such a pain. 90% of the clients were either half-baked or well-baked, but super out-of-date, and without having certain XEP numbers memorized, finding the remaining 10% was super frustrating.
    - ezst 3y ago
      I don't think it makes sense to expect XMPP to "make an impact" ever, if by that you mean "to spontaneously become the next dominant network" (or it already is, under the guise of WhatsApp, bar the federated aspect). The forces in presence are too uneven and the modern internet is too consolidated to permit that to happen (even google cannot dislodge WhatsApp/Messenger). IMO, what does matter for XMPP's future is that it remains appealing to a growing niche of users who want to be in control, for whom self/local-hosting is important (XMPP excels at that), who care about privacy (OMEMO is state of the art, and XMPP offers gentler alternatives where PFS isn't desired), and who understand the benefits of federation for resilience. This niche will grow naturally as more and more people get deceived by every monopolistic network being doomed to grow beyond a threshold of sustainability and implode as a result. By that time, it only matters that there are enough sufficiently well maintained and user-friendly clients on all platforms for those "super-users" to embark their peers (which is currently largely the case). This is how I ended-up here, in fact. I refused to join WhatsApp because I was tired of previous forced migrations from protocols I thought were "too big to fail" (MSN, Skype, …), WhatsApp was already banned in some of the countries I was travelling to for work, and I so, after a failed errand with Matrix, I rediscovered XMPP 10 years after I had my first account on it. Today I have about a hundred contacts there, and the less tech-literate of my peers notice no practical difference in usability or features compared to something like WhatsApp: it just works.

by ezst 3y ago

aidenn0 3y ago

It's been a while, but I seem to recall group chats being a bit unwieldy in XMPP. Other issue with XMPP is how hard it is to find clients that don't suck (particularly if you want to interop; I think I've seen at least 3 different ways clients implemented emojis, for example).

ezst 3y ago
Group chats work pretty well in my experience. The spec for MUC is rather large even though only a small portion of it is used in practice (the roles/ACL capabilities go way beyond that of other protocols, probably inheriting the requirements of large-scale government/corporate deployments). There were also some challenges early-on relating to mobile use-cases (e.g. how to notify/respond to a user who's not joined to the group chat because their client is offline), and XMPP has grown a set of extensions in that area (push notifications, stream resumption, …). > Other issue with XMPP is how hard it is to find clients that don't suck OK, but the alternative we are talking about here consists of developing the server, protocol and clients all at once and from scratch, and end-up with something that's merely a prototype heading into a decade worth of enhancement and scalability improvements, iteratively bumping into the exact same kind of problems. Wouldn't it be less effort to just make an XMPP client that doesn't suck and lead by example? (That's pretty much what the "Conversations" Android client did when it came out, and now it's used by the German government, among others). > I think I've seen at least 3 different ways clients implemented emojis, for example I'm not aware of anything like that. There are different ways to do certain things, like sending attachments (HTTP upload or client-to-client), but that's the good thing about XMPP: your client/server negotiate capabilities and sometimes even translate among them. I won't pretend that everything is rosy, for sure, but it also isn't that bad.

tredre3 3y ago

Whatsapp succeeded with XMPP because they defined a superset and their only client implements 100% of it. This isn't applicable to XMPP at large at all. I tried getting E2EE working. There are 3 standards. Some clients implement one or two of them. Some clients none. It's a nightmare to get them to talk together. Then you have all the other 400 XEPs that may or may not be implemented by clients. Things like file transfer, typing indicator, video chat, avatars, group chats. The only way XMPP becomes relevant again is if they choose a subset of REQUIRED features and clients must implement them all to be considered XMPP2-compatible.

Zash 3y ago
Such a subset exists already: https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/ https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/
- aidenn0 3y ago
  That's great. Probably too late to make an impact (And I say this as someone who uses XMPP regularly), but I would have killed for something like that 10 years ago. Weeding through clients was such a pain. 90% of the clients were either half-baked or well-baked, but super out-of-date, and without having certain XEP numbers memorized, finding the remaining 10% was super frustrating.
  - ezst 3y ago
    I don't think it makes sense to expect XMPP to "make an impact" ever, if by that you mean "to spontaneously become the next dominant network" (or it already is, under the guise of WhatsApp, bar the federated aspect). The forces in presence are too uneven and the modern internet is too consolidated to permit that to happen (even google cannot dislodge WhatsApp/Messenger). IMO, what does matter for XMPP's future is that it remains appealing to a growing niche of users who want to be in control, for whom self/local-hosting is important (XMPP excels at that), who care about privacy (OMEMO is state of the art, and XMPP offers gentler alternatives where PFS isn't desired), and who understand the benefits of federation for resilience. This niche will grow naturally as more and more people get deceived by every monopolistic network being doomed to grow beyond a threshold of sustainability and implode as a result. By that time, it only matters that there are enough sufficiently well maintained and user-friendly clients on all platforms for those "super-users" to embark their peers (which is currently largely the case). This is how I ended-up here, in fact. I refused to join WhatsApp because I was tired of previous forced migrations from protocols I thought were "too big to fail" (MSN, Skype, …), WhatsApp was already banned in some of the countries I was travelling to for work, and I so, after a failed errand with Matrix, I rediscovered XMPP 10 years after I had my first account on it. Today I have about a hundred contacts there, and the less tech-literate of my peers notice no practical difference in usability or features compared to something like WhatsApp: it just works.