9 ms·

Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-G

Sigh, yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

jkarneges 12y ago
Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/
- TaylorAlexander 12y ago
  This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs. This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol. Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location. The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS). I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone. I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
  - runn1ng 12y ago
    > Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them. Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
    - vitno 12y ago
      Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty. Some of us do care.
      - runn1ng 12y ago
        Nice, I did not know. Really Where is the source code?
        julionc 12y ago
        The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
        runn1ng 12y ago
        It seems like the source for Arch discussion, that seems to be similar, but slightly different, to Hacker News. But it's better than nothing.
    - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
      But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests. So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
- amyjess 12y ago
  It's worse now. Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client. But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.
multiplicity 12y ago
I had a unified messaging system, it was called Trillian and Adium, and it was awesome. Then one day, random people from Gmail started to appear in my Gtalk contact list, and the whole thing became useless and creepy.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system? We'll always have SMS.
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  SMS? Or SMS, iChat, Hangouts, Whatsapp, and the thousands of others that use your SMS number as username? Some (iChat, Hangouts) even steal your SMSs and place them on proprietary networks; If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    SMS, the network. > If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost. I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.
    - reustle 12y ago
      It doesn't matter if it is stupid simple, it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        So start your own communications network. Market it. Make it open. May the best solution win.
        kedean 12y ago
        It's not about the best solution, and everyone needs to stop pretending it is. This sort of thing comes down to which solution has the most corporate backing. The only exceptions are when an open solution happens to hold on for long enough (on the order of years) for a major player to realize that its good and maybe they should give it a chance (example: OpenStack's support by PayPal right now, or when Linux finally started going someplace in the early 2000's with Canonical and RedHat). Give me an example of 'the best solution' winning despite major corporate backing of the proprietary competitor?
cbhl 12y ago
It's worth noting that XMPP was based on XML. New hotness is JSON, or maybe even compressed binary protocols.
- jkarneges 12y ago
  The funny thing is that XMPP was created when XML was the current hotness. SMTP survived despite changing fads. If we're ever going to standardize IM (or anything), we have to accept that protocols may use older technology. Someday JSON will be old too. Let's not make these mistakes again.
  - olau 12y ago
    At the time when XMPP was getting standardized and was still mostly known as Jabber, I started implementing a Jabber chat client with a friend. The problem with XMPP isn't that it was based on XML. No, what made it annoying was that the dudes who made it decided that instead of basing it on exchanging individual messages, i.e. XML documents like everyone else does, everything must instead be put inside a so-called XML stream. IIRC it basically meant that the exchange started with a start tag that wasn't terminated until the connection was closed. Since nothing at the time was designed to work with unfinished XML documents (remember the end tag doesn't come until you're done), all the convenient standard XML tools/libraries wouldn't work. So I don't think XMPP is a stellar piece of work. But it's of course much better than some proprietary crap, and it's sad to see it lose support, although I imagine to Google and Facebook who both probably couldn't care less about interoperability, having an open XMPP interface is probably more of a liability (spammers, enables people to skip their ads) than something they get much perceived value out of.
    - jkarneges 12y ago
      Even though it seems like a strange decision, using XML for the stream framing made the protocol nicely pure. It theoretically meant you didn't need to write a parser (this was a rare thing for a network protocol). In practice, though, you're right, most parsers at the time didn't work well with network streams. Of course, lack of adoption by the big providers was almost certainly political rather than technical.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hengheng 12y ago
So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work. I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work! Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.
- click170 12y ago
  Can you go into detail about what features were lacking? For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.
  - hengheng 12y ago
    Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.
    - click170 12y ago
na85 12y ago
I've been saying for years that an update to the IRC protocol to allow for push notifications without requiring users to have a shell and set up a bnc would be pretty much ideal. The constant ping-pongs really dissuade me from using IRC on my mobile as it kills my battery life. Being able to set some kind of "mobile" mode and receive push notifications if I get a hilight would be ideal.
- DanTheManPR 12y ago
  Some of the cloud-based IRC clients do a lot of this (I'm a big fan of IRCCloud). But it would be nice these kinds of features were baked into the protocol. When something like a majority of users want a feature, it should probably be part of the protocol.
- BuildTheRobots 12y ago
  I've ended up using the www.ircCloud.com service as my bouncer. It gives lovely native mobile apps with proper push and has a much nicer/more usable interface than any other solution I was capable of rigging up myself.

jkarneges 12y ago

Now we have twice as many incompatible services. And still dreaming. :/

TaylorAlexander 12y ago
This is what we get when we embrace closed platforms. Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services and closed platforms will always manipulate you for their needs. This is why I want to make a Free Hardware cell phone. I have made one wireless product already and wrote the frequency hopping stack myself, but something like a phone needs better data rates and a more advanced protocol. Still, I dream of a simple cell phone that runs vanilla linux and has apps for IRC, XMPP, and the other functions you would want. The key component would be that the protocol would be designed from the ground up to respect user privacy, including a "broadcast" mode for towers where certain low data rate data channels are streamed without requiring any transmission from the handset. Then you could follow IRC or twitter during a protest without any risk of being probed for your location. The protocol would also be built with anonymity in mind as much as possible, so phones would route data using rolling anonymous ID numbers and spoofing location could perhaps be trivial for plausible deniability (unless that opens up a vector for DoS). I met the "Game of Drones" guys last night and they seemed interested in my wireless. I can only do 1km at 20kbps with current boards and 10km at 20kbps with amplified boards, but I think they might be interested in a solution that would work for FPV and that could be a good excuse to develop something that would also work for a cell phone. I am 100% Free Hardware all the way, so maybe your dreams can come true eventually. :)
- runn1ng 12y ago
  > Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them. Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
  - vitno 12y ago
    Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty. Some of us do care.
    - runn1ng 12y ago
      Nice, I did not know. Really Where is the source code?
      - julionc 12y ago
        The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/ https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
        runn1ng 12y ago
        It seems like the source for Arch discussion, that seems to be similar, but slightly different, to Hacker News. But it's better than nothing.
  - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
    But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests. So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.
amyjess 12y ago
It's worse now. Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client. But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.

multiplicity 12y ago

I had a unified messaging system, it was called Trillian and Adium, and it was awesome. Then one day, random people from Gmail started to appear in my Gtalk contact list, and the whole thing became useless and creepy.

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system? We'll always have SMS.

GauntletWizard 12y ago
SMS? Or SMS, iChat, Hangouts, Whatsapp, and the thousands of others that use your SMS number as username? Some (iChat, Hangouts) even steal your SMSs and place them on proprietary networks; If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  SMS, the network. > If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost. I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270 Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.
  - reustle 12y ago
    It doesn't matter if it is stupid simple, it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      So start your own communications network. Market it. Make it open. May the best solution win.
      - kedean 12y ago
        It's not about the best solution, and everyone needs to stop pretending it is. This sort of thing comes down to which solution has the most corporate backing. The only exceptions are when an open solution happens to hold on for long enough (on the order of years) for a major player to realize that its good and maybe they should give it a chance (example: OpenStack's support by PayPal right now, or when Linux finally started going someplace in the early 2000's with Canonical and RedHat). Give me an example of 'the best solution' winning despite major corporate backing of the proprietary competitor?

cbhl 12y ago

It's worth noting that XMPP was based on XML. New hotness is JSON, or maybe even compressed binary protocols.

jkarneges 12y ago
The funny thing is that XMPP was created when XML was the current hotness. SMTP survived despite changing fads. If we're ever going to standardize IM (or anything), we have to accept that protocols may use older technology. Someday JSON will be old too. Let's not make these mistakes again.
- olau 12y ago
  At the time when XMPP was getting standardized and was still mostly known as Jabber, I started implementing a Jabber chat client with a friend. The problem with XMPP isn't that it was based on XML. No, what made it annoying was that the dudes who made it decided that instead of basing it on exchanging individual messages, i.e. XML documents like everyone else does, everything must instead be put inside a so-called XML stream. IIRC it basically meant that the exchange started with a start tag that wasn't terminated until the connection was closed. Since nothing at the time was designed to work with unfinished XML documents (remember the end tag doesn't come until you're done), all the convenient standard XML tools/libraries wouldn't work. So I don't think XMPP is a stellar piece of work. But it's of course much better than some proprietary crap, and it's sad to see it lose support, although I imagine to Google and Facebook who both probably couldn't care less about interoperability, having an open XMPP interface is probably more of a liability (spammers, enables people to skip their ads) than something they get much perceived value out of.
  - jkarneges 12y ago
    Even though it seems like a strange decision, using XML for the stream framing made the protocol nicely pure. It theoretically meant you didn't need to write a parser (this was a rare thing for a network protocol). In practice, though, you're right, most parsers at the time didn't work well with network streams. Of course, lack of adoption by the big providers was almost certainly political rather than technical.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hengheng 12y ago

So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work. I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work! Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.

click170 12y ago
Can you go into detail about what features were lacking? For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.
- hengheng 12y ago
  Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.
  - click170 12y ago

na85 12y ago

I've been saying for years that an update to the IRC protocol to allow for push notifications without requiring users to have a shell and set up a bnc would be pretty much ideal. The constant ping-pongs really dissuade me from using IRC on my mobile as it kills my battery life. Being able to set some kind of "mobile" mode and receive push notifications if I get a hilight would be ideal.

DanTheManPR 12y ago
Some of the cloud-based IRC clients do a lot of this (I'm a big fan of IRCCloud). But it would be nice these kinds of features were baked into the protocol. When something like a majority of users want a feature, it should probably be part of the protocol.
BuildTheRobots 12y ago
I've ended up using the www.ircCloud.com service as my bouncer. It gives lovely native mobile apps with proper push and has a much nicer/more usable interface than any other solution I was capable of rigging up myself.