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Small plug for XMPP. It's worth knowing about if you find Matrix too bloated/corpo-scary and IRC too limiting. It's also an old established protocol with plenty

Small plug for XMPP. It's worth knowing about if you find Matrix too bloated/corpo-scary and IRC too limiting. It's also an old established protocol with plenty of users already.

cyberax 3y ago
Whatever happens with Matrix, XMPP is _never_ the right answer.
- zaik 3y ago
  Why not?
  - vaylian 3y ago
    Not GP, but I think the biggest flaw in XMPP is that doesn't define a reasonable baseline for what features need to be supported. XMPP has extensions, but you can't really be sure that all clients and servers implement them all. This is especially important when you want to use end-to-end message encryption, where both parties definitely need to support the same modern standards. I wouldn't mind if XMPP became more successful again. But for that to happen it needs to move some XEPs into the core protocol.
    - MattJ100 3y ago
      For what it's worth this issue is not as big as people generally make it out to be. Everything doesn't need to support everything for communication to be successful. The XMPP Standards Foundation publish an annual compliance baseline for different categories of XMPP application. There are also projects such as Snikket (disclaimer: I work on this), which remove the confusion entirely. At the end of the day the solution is not for end users to "use XMPP", but for good products to build on and use XMPP. I wrote on this topic at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
      - vaylian 3y ago
        Thank you. I didn't know about Snikket. This looks promising. And maybe Snikket will also succeed in establishing a new baseline for XMPP features.
    - heinrich5991 3y ago
      The same problem exists in Matrix btw: Check out the features dropdown in https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. It's just hidden better in Matrix which seems to make people think it does not exist.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    XMPP itself is a horrible protocol, on all levels. It has been extended to oblivion, but extensions are not consistently implemented. And all the XMPP client applications also kinda suck.
- MattJ100 3y ago
  You're welcome to your opinions, but just know that many people happily using XMPP disagree with you. As a replacement for Discord? I think it depends on the community, but it's true we don't have anything remarkably equivalent to Discord that I'd recommend right now. That's open to change, though.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Many people? That depends on the definition of "many". If it's "more than 2", then it's certainly true. We do have something close to Discord in functionality, it's Matrix. It's not the best, but at least it's not built on the foundation of recursive WTFs.

Small plug for XMPP. It's worth knowing about if you find Matrix too bloated/corpo-scary and IRC too limiting. It's also an old established protocol with plenty of users already.

cyberax 3y ago

Whatever happens with Matrix, XMPP is _never_ the right answer.

zaik 3y ago
Why not?
- vaylian 3y ago
  Not GP, but I think the biggest flaw in XMPP is that doesn't define a reasonable baseline for what features need to be supported. XMPP has extensions, but you can't really be sure that all clients and servers implement them all. This is especially important when you want to use end-to-end message encryption, where both parties definitely need to support the same modern standards. I wouldn't mind if XMPP became more successful again. But for that to happen it needs to move some XEPs into the core protocol.
  - MattJ100 3y ago
    For what it's worth this issue is not as big as people generally make it out to be. Everything doesn't need to support everything for communication to be successful. The XMPP Standards Foundation publish an annual compliance baseline for different categories of XMPP application. There are also projects such as Snikket (disclaimer: I work on this), which remove the confusion entirely. At the end of the day the solution is not for end users to "use XMPP", but for good products to build on and use XMPP. I wrote on this topic at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
    - vaylian 3y ago
      Thank you. I didn't know about Snikket. This looks promising. And maybe Snikket will also succeed in establishing a new baseline for XMPP features.
  - heinrich5991 3y ago
    The same problem exists in Matrix btw: Check out the features dropdown in https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. It's just hidden better in Matrix which seems to make people think it does not exist.
- cyberax 3y ago
  XMPP itself is a horrible protocol, on all levels. It has been extended to oblivion, but extensions are not consistently implemented. And all the XMPP client applications also kinda suck.
MattJ100 3y ago
You're welcome to your opinions, but just know that many people happily using XMPP disagree with you. As a replacement for Discord? I think it depends on the community, but it's true we don't have anything remarkably equivalent to Discord that I'd recommend right now. That's open to change, though.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Many people? That depends on the definition of "many". If it's "more than 2", then it's certainly true. We do have something close to Discord in functionality, it's Matrix. It's not the best, but at least it's not built on the foundation of recursive WTFs.