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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
by 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 agoOut of curiosity, what were XMPP's alternatives at the time?
- ahofmann 2y agoIRC, nothing else. All other protocols like ICQ, etc. where proprietary.
- lmm 2y agoThe 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".