2 ms·
Yes, it's theoretically possible to adapt many protocols to many use cases, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Email and XMPP are just geared towards very
by lxgr 2y ago
Yes, it's theoretically possible to adapt many protocols to many use cases, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Email and XMPP are just geared towards very different use cases.
In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.
- immibis 2y agoAs programmers, is it not our natural instinct to create a ChatSystem and MailSystem on top of a GenericMessageDeliverySystem? When did we stop doing that? Creating a brand new GenericMessageDeliverySystem for each purpose comes with substantial costs. We don't reinvent the Internet to create WhatsApp.
- lxgr 2y agoWhat generic message delivery system are you talking about, though? SMTP is optimized for the use case of email; XMPP is optimized for one-to-one instant messaging; Matrix is optimized for "Slack-like" chat. I highly doubt that these three use cases are similar enough to warrant introducing an additional common protocol/layer.
- immibis 2y agoOptimized how?