
XMPP works – 1 July 2020 - upofadown
https://xmpp.org/2020/07/newsletter-01-july/
======
GuardLlama
XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse:

1\. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular
"public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple
hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the
server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP
operator with very directed violence. If you don't host your own, who is
running your XMPP server? What will they do when the
government/yourThreatActor threatens them?

2\. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a
halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push
notifications? Their Windows 10 desktop? Ubuntu Linux?

3\. If you run your own server, what do you do in the unlikely event of spam?

4\. Crypto? OTR sucks for multi-device, OMEMO isn't extensively supported.

XMPP obviously doesn't work, but I can't suggest anything that's better.

~~~
jayd16
When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for
mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering
was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at
the time.

At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very
poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work
like that?

I think XMPP just failed to cater to any audience. The Googles and Facebooks
could roll their own and for everyone else it was too cumbersome. It's not as
"easy" as running an email server and no one wants to do that either. It
wasn't even agile enough to woo small communities with whiz-bang features.

~~~
icedchai
I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat
system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful.

On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in
the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

~~~
Macha
> Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

Outside the United States, very few people were on it. When I signed up to
play some video games with some US friends from a forum, I remember having to
Google a valid US address and it's matching ZIP code as it wouldn't even let
me sign up without one.

MSN was more popular in western Europe and as I understand it ICQ (eventually
federated and shared some tech, but not the same network) was the top early IM
in eastern Europe. Can't comment on the rest of the world at that time but I
doubt the sign-up form was any more accepting of Korean addresses for example.

~~~
gpderetta
ICQ was also huge in Italy and, I understand, most of western Europe, at the
turn of the millennium. Then MSN took over.

Imagine if the global phone network was balkanized like messaging networks...

------
foxfired
What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or
other closed systems?

In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each
other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail,
aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't
a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to
everyone should use slack?

~~~
rektide
"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should
use slack?"

Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we
are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient &
the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on
Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.

~~~
sacks2k
"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook
so we no longer wanna hang out on it"

I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything
shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and
removed almost immediately.

I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because
of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem to have become mainstream like
the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not
wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans.
Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past.

It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events,
especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the
current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our
throats.

Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will
attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you.
It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.

~~~
rektide
> I'm not sure which Facebook you're using,

As I said, we're not using it anymore.

Ben Shapiro & BlueLives Matter were 6 of the 10 most reshared pieces of
content yesterday & none of the other top 10 are anything but polarizing
trashy antagonistic regressives either.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/128100072722610...](https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1281000727226101760)

I would be willing to admit, this kind of content does not feature a lot in my
personal experience when I did use Facebook. But in general, I'm not inclined
to log in & stay logged in, as it doesn't add continuous value. And I don't
want to give advertising-dollars to a platform that does, day after day after
day, reliably, serve to brainwash America with these reactionary attention-
hungry wolves.

I'd point out that the Salem witch trials you raise judged people based on
fiction (there are no witches), & killed them. Losing some friends & your job
for being a demonstratively terrible awful person does not seem like a fair
comparison: there is real guilt, & the consequences seem survivable. I'm not
sure that the ability of any one incident to become a lightning rod of
attention is ideal, but it felt like being an absolutely terrible person for
too long had no consequences: I would like to see more safety nets, more
forgiveness, more healing, but there being consequences for actions is an
enormous improvement over where we were, and frankly the consequences seem
reasonably inline & reasonable in a vast majority of the situations at hand.

I'm sorry that this seems so overwhelming for you. I hope you can find some
peace.

------
est
It's never about the protocol, it's about the SLA of the server and UX design
of the client.

------
zelphirkalt
A while ago I tried getting the latest version of Gajim (XMPP client) to run
with OMEMO (encryption plugin) on Trisquel. I worked through lots and lots of
compilation issues for dependency libraries of Gnome and other stuff that was
new to me, but after trying for something like 3 or 4 days, I lost motivation.
I also did not want to use the version number-wise much older version of Gajim
to be able to use it. Perhaps that was silly of me.

I did run the older version to try Gajim out and to see how one connects to
servers and which servers to use and whatever. That worked actually pretty
well. I only had to find an OMEMO supporting server in at least superficially
trustworthy hands. I really likes the instant feeling of sending messages and
being able to log into 2 accounts on different servers and sending myself
messages.

I'll have to try it again at some point. I would really like to know a
reliable long term server, run by people with a privacy mindset though.

------
techntoke
It seems like with the right client that IRC could basically do what Discord
does today, but without the need for all the bloat.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
TheLounge is an interesting web client for IRC that's very useable on mobile.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
XMPP is a very resilient protocol that has survived the years of neglect and
mismanagement by the XSF.

~~~
ppjet6
As a board member of the XSF for this term and for the first time, I don't
really find myself in disagreement. It seems to me the culture of change is
almost nonexistent and it's hard or close to impossible to get the XSF to
provoke it.

------
Markoff
it doesn't really matter if nobody is using it, this is Betamax vs VHS all
over

------
opendomain
One of the first OpenDomain!

------
Multicomp
Can anyone point me to other RSS-able newsletters I should follow? Between
This Week In Matrix, Sergey Tihon's F# Weekly, Pine64s updates on the
Pinephone, and now this XMPP newsletter (which admittedly I thought was a
Johnny-come-lately approach to showing that XMPP was cool like Matrix, see,
we've got the newsletter stuff too! - but A: it's clear they have been doing
this for a bit and B: I digress), I'm enjoying reading tech 'periodicals' and
keeping up with what's new in my favorite technologies.

