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We were living in the future. Around ~2010 we could use Jabber/XMPP to chat with people on various community services, Google Talk, LiveJournal talk, etc. Besid
by microtonal 1y ago
We were living in the future. Around ~2010 we could use Jabber/XMPP to chat with people on various community services, Google Talk, LiveJournal talk, etc. Besides great Linux clients, macOS had iChat which supported XMPP, etc.
- icedchai 1y agoI briefly worked on an XMPP client around that time. It cemented my opinion that the protocol was an absolute abomination.
- dietrichepp 1y agoCompany I worked at back then used XMPP. There was something that you could paste into the chat that would make all of the Mac clients crash, and to fix it, someone with a different client would have to join the chat and type a lot of comments to flood the history. I am not surprised to hear the protocol is an abomination.
- kentrado 1y agoSeems like a problem with the client rather than the protocol.
- opan 1y agoYeah, there was a similar bug in HexChat and other (pango?) stuff some years back. I remember even though I was using irssi, it could crash my Termite window.
- wink 1y agoKinda, but if there is only a limited subset of clients and everyone is basically on the one default per platform, it simply doesn't help.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThat's quite unspecific and unhelpful. Personally I find XMPP much makes sense. Sure it's this weird streaming XML thing, but there's a request/response pattern (IQ) inside that seems fine. I love how nicely it composes: accounts have a tree of nodes they can define for whatever content they want, which is a sensible & flexible base. Then there's pubsub, and ACL capability specs on top of that. Everything stacks relatively sensibly. The past decade has seen some good XMPP Enhancement Protocols (XEP) to create best practices & recommended feature sets. It was such a small jump to create a full "everything app" atop XMPP baseline capabilities: > Libervia [ed: nee Salut-a-Too] is a all-in-one tool to manage all your communications needs: instant messaging, (micro)blogging, file sharing, photo albums, events, forums, tasks, etc. https://libervia.org/ https://libervia.org/ It's unfortunate that the top rated comment is uncontestable blanket desparagement. Can we raise this from a low criticism to something respect-worthy?
- icedchai 1y agoI wasn't trying to be specific, just an opinion on what I experienced 10+ years ago. Others are welcome to work with the protocol and develop their own opinions.
- hackyhacky 1y agoIf your opinion is based on concrete experience, you could help people understand your position by sharing the specific aspects of XMPP that you dislike. An opinion without evidence or reasoning is not a valuable contribution to the conversation.
- tcfhgj 1y agoMy opinion: XMPP is too little like Matrix (e.g. decentralized rooms, people as verification targets, messages (incl. e2ee ones) easily synced to all sessions) while Matrix is in a sub optimal state due to the Element/Element X client split
- icedchai 1y agoIt's been well over 10 years since I worked with, almost 15. I remember issues with keeping multiple devices in sync, syncing them back up when a user comes back online, especially with multiuser chats. I understand that is probably better now, with carbons and archiving XEPs. In general, it felt like, XMPP has too many "optional" features. The core protocol is tiny, but everything you need and want to make it useful is optional.
- oofbey 1y agoXMPP fans are continuously baffled by why XMPP isn't used for _everything_. STILL! When will the world wake up and realize its simplicity and beauty?
- uncircle 1y agoPro tip: when a protocol's name contains the words "extensible", "flexible", "universal", "interoperable", they tend to be utter abominations designed by a committee of stakeholders often with conflicting, if not completely unreasonable, requirements.
- bombela 1y agoYep it was great. I had one client per device. Could talk to everybody. I had a consistent UX. Sure sharing pictures and videos wasn't easy then. But also the pay to use features and dark patterns weren't an issue either.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoTrillian and Gaim... (2000 and 1999)
- johnisgood 1y agoNow Gajim still exists and is maintained. :P
- BGZq7 1y agoGajim is unrelated to Gaim. Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though, which still exists.
- johnisgood 1y agoOh, yeah I knew Gaim became Pidgin, but I thought Gajim is a fork of Gaim as well, Gaim revived. Oops.
- a96 1y agoBeing in any way associated with AIM/AOL was a bad thing, which they probably realized way too late.
- zsiddique 1y agoYou could even use an XMPP client with HipChat for your business chat. Though, I'd argue XMPP was one of the factors that contributed to HipChat's demise (it wasn't the sole reason, but trying to scale presence via XMPP proved to be a nightmare).
- oofbey 1y agoPresence is the key problem. It scales badly - in terms of compute, bandwidth, and battery. And it's not actually useful. Lose lose. Solution: don't use XMPP.
- opan 1y agoMatrix had similar problems and most servers just disable presence. Can XMPP not do this?
- SoftTalker 1y agoWho GAF about presence. If the person answers, they're there.
- mycall 1y agoMatrix Bridges do something similar.
- pigeons 1y agoThose services, and more like facebook messenger used the XMPP protocol on both ends. Matrix bridges clumsily translate some of the feature of one protocol and display the chat on the other end.
- donatj 1y agoI miss the days when our best minds developed protocols instead of products. The last 15 years has been just the commodification and destruction of everything the previous generation has built. I'm frankly surprised email has stood up as well as it has, even if it is nearly impossible to run your own email server these days. In the mid-to-late teens IRC was making something of a comeback and then Slack EEE'd it.
- pyrale 1y ago> The last 15 years has been just the commodification Just a lexical correction to your message: the establishment of standard protocols is a process of comodification. The main goal of making a product "unique" and not interoperable is to avoid being comoditized.
- harpiaharpyja 1y agoYeah, "commodification" is the wrong word here. I'm not sure what the best word would be, but it would be more along the lines of "extraction" or "exploitation". As in: The last 15 years has been just relentless attempts to bend and twist everything the previous generation has built to extract value instead of creating it. Something like that.
- simonjgreen 1y agoI had optimism for Slack when they launched IRC and XMPP gateways natively. Sadly, this is now long dead.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- HumblyTossed 1y agoThose were good times.