5 ms·

Remember when we used open protocols to chat and you could use whatever client you wanted?

by CalRobert 2y ago

agumonkey 2y ago
This era is so full of paradoxical forces, I'm struggling to follow.
- RGamma 2y ago
  Could I interest you in everything, all of the time? https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    Timely Burnham
psjnd 2y ago
1 to 1 comms is easy to make free. 1 to many and 1 to all is another matter entirely. They have never been free no matter what the protocol or medium was used. If free, it has always been during market capture phase after which ppl pay one way or another. So your choices are either pay for the pipes or get it subsidized via personal data for ads.
- piva00 2y ago
  IRC servers were absolutely free and without ads. At most you could choose to support the network you were in through a donation.
  - ahofmann 2y ago
    I think it is much cheaper to run a few thousand irc servers than running discord, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp etc. How many active irc users do we have? 200k? 2mil? I don't know. But every other provider has users in the multiple millions or billions. This is not another League, this is an entirely other game. I really want to have my old Internet back, were everything was provided for free by volunteers. But this is not the world where discord operates, discord and FAANG are dealing with the eternal September of the last two decades.
    - RGamma 2y ago
      Fuck everyone else. We still have us.
  - chorizoking 2y ago
    IRC is still there, you can still use it if you dislike Discord. No-one is forcing you. Reality is that IRC has so many issues (netsplit in 2025 LOL, retaining messages, lack of rich media, fragmented extensions to name a few) which is why it's not being used.
boramalper 2y ago
I honestly don’t remember ever using open protocols to chat, sorry. Born in ‘97, I was too young for IRC’s height, and although I flirted with XMPP, none of my friends were there so it was just me and a handful of like-minded people I’ve met on the Internet. I think XMPP’s peak was when Facebook and Google supported it for a while, before erecting the walls. Now there is Matrix which serves a similar niche (albeit more successfully) but doesn’t seem that interested in being a WhatsApp/iMessage replacement for casual day-to-day use. Discord and Telegram have a huge social network element to them but in my limited experience, the performance issues in the very protocol itself and/or with Element (the de-facto Matrix client) hinder its adoption.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great. But as the olds like me fade away nobody who remembers the open internet will be around to say what we lost :-(
  - boramalper 2y ago
    > Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great. But AIM, ICQ, MSN etc weren't open protocols either right? It was gaim/others reverse-engineering those protocols, like Pidgin [0] today. [0] https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/ https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      Good point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol Though the lack of a reverse engineered Slack protocol (remember when they had an IRC bridge?) suggests companies are better at preventing this now. Edit: apparently there's https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple at least!
- mauvia 2y ago
  Actually there was a golden age where XMPP supported Google Talk and Facebook Messenger.
lmm 2y ago
Yeah, it sucked. Honestly XMPP might as well have been a false flag operation to sabotage open chat development. (I don't think it was, but the effect was the same). It sucked all the oxygen out of the open chat protocol design space, while being simultaneously too complex and extensible to allow an efficient implementation, but also too inflexible to actually adapt to new use cases (in particular it took ages for the "extensions" needed to make it not awful on phone to be adopted, sandbagging the biggest growth area at exactly the time when it might otherwise have been successful).
- boramalper 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, what were XMPP's alternatives at the time?
  - ahofmann 2y ago
    IRC, nothing else. All other protocols like ICQ, etc. where proprietary.
  - lmm 2y ago
    The open-source ones? I don't even remember nowadays, because they got squished under the XMPP juggernaut. I think there was one that was based off of Gadu-Gadu's protocol (may even have been basically the same protocol with just the servers switched out). But whenever someone tried to drum up support for a new open-source messenger it was always "Why not just use XMPP? It's the standard, and it's extensible, so I'm sure it can accommodate whatever features you were thinking of".

Remember when we used open protocols to chat and you could use whatever client you wanted?

agumonkey 2y ago

This era is so full of paradoxical forces, I'm struggling to follow.

RGamma 2y ago
Could I interest you in everything, all of the time? https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Timely Burnham

psjnd 2y ago

1 to 1 comms is easy to make free. 1 to many and 1 to all is another matter entirely. They have never been free no matter what the protocol or medium was used. If free, it has always been during market capture phase after which ppl pay one way or another. So your choices are either pay for the pipes or get it subsidized via personal data for ads.

piva00 2y ago
IRC servers were absolutely free and without ads. At most you could choose to support the network you were in through a donation.
- ahofmann 2y ago
  I think it is much cheaper to run a few thousand irc servers than running discord, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp etc. How many active irc users do we have? 200k? 2mil? I don't know. But every other provider has users in the multiple millions or billions. This is not another League, this is an entirely other game. I really want to have my old Internet back, were everything was provided for free by volunteers. But this is not the world where discord operates, discord and FAANG are dealing with the eternal September of the last two decades.
  - RGamma 2y ago
    Fuck everyone else. We still have us.
- chorizoking 2y ago
  IRC is still there, you can still use it if you dislike Discord. No-one is forcing you. Reality is that IRC has so many issues (netsplit in 2025 LOL, retaining messages, lack of rich media, fragmented extensions to name a few) which is why it's not being used.

boramalper 2y ago

I honestly don’t remember ever using open protocols to chat, sorry. Born in ‘97, I was too young for IRC’s height, and although I flirted with XMPP, none of my friends were there so it was just me and a handful of like-minded people I’ve met on the Internet. I think XMPP’s peak was when Facebook and Google supported it for a while, before erecting the walls. Now there is Matrix which serves a similar niche (albeit more successfully) but doesn’t seem that interested in being a WhatsApp/iMessage replacement for casual day-to-day use. Discord and Telegram have a huge social network element to them but in my limited experience, the performance issues in the very protocol itself and/or with Element (the de-facto Matrix client) hinder its adoption.

CalRobert 2y ago
Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great. But as the olds like me fade away nobody who remembers the open internet will be around to say what we lost :-(
- boramalper 2y ago
  > Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great. But AIM, ICQ, MSN etc weren't open protocols either right? It was gaim/others reverse-engineering those protocols, like Pidgin [0] today. [0] https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/ https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Good point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol Though the lack of a reverse engineered Slack protocol (remember when they had an IRC bridge?) suggests companies are better at preventing this now. Edit: apparently there's https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple at least!
mauvia 2y ago
Actually there was a golden age where XMPP supported Google Talk and Facebook Messenger.

lmm 2y ago

Yeah, it sucked. Honestly XMPP might as well have been a false flag operation to sabotage open chat development. (I don't think it was, but the effect was the same). It sucked all the oxygen out of the open chat protocol design space, while being simultaneously too complex and extensible to allow an efficient implementation, but also too inflexible to actually adapt to new use cases (in particular it took ages for the "extensions" needed to make it not awful on phone to be adopted, sandbagging the biggest growth area at exactly the time when it might otherwise have been successful).

boramalper 2y ago
Out of curiosity, what were XMPP's alternatives at the time?
- ahofmann 2y ago
  IRC, nothing else. All other protocols like ICQ, etc. where proprietary.
- lmm 2y ago
  The open-source ones? I don't even remember nowadays, because they got squished under the XMPP juggernaut. I think there was one that was based off of Gadu-Gadu's protocol (may even have been basically the same protocol with just the servers switched out). But whenever someone tried to drum up support for a new open-source messenger it was always "Why not just use XMPP? It's the standard, and it's extensible, so I'm sure it can accommodate whatever features you were thinking of".