
Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away - jwise0
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat
======
automathematics
Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts

Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is:

1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to
track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for
"ignoring her"

2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which
often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them).

This has been a nightmare for me over the last 2 years and I can't stand how
something as simple and SOLVED as chat protocol has been nuked and replaced
with proprietary crap that thinks it's impressive to announce a semantic MAJOR
release update that touts "Group Messaging" as a major new innovation (I'm
looking at you, Apple).

Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and
be done with it.

~~~
nostrademons
This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee
(also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to
my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team
doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.

I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks
are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in
the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS,
i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally
experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know
I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes
later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.

~~~
_nedR
What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions
online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI
guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and
failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 -
2 minutes).

~~~
Tepix
Your bank is using a bad SMS service provider. With a SS7 uplink (versus a
cheap SMPP connection), it should arrive within seconds, with a delivery
report for the sender, if desired.

------
jwise0
A quick comment on why I submitted this ...

This will substantially change the way I interact with Facebook Messenger, and
irritatingly so. For the past as long as I remember, all of my IM services
have shown up in one client (naim; then Pidgin; then Adium). I'll now be
forced to either use the Facebook web client (and, in doing so, feed the mis-
tuned reward system in my brain that stimulates itself from seeing the
notifications icon light up ...) or use a poor approximation of a keyboard on
my cell phone.

It's irritating when a service that I use gets shut down. But, the thing
that's truly irritating to me is that I don't even have the option of not
using it: I'm locked in still by network effects, and Facebook know it.

~~~
hudell
I'm still not over the death of Facebook Messenger for Windows. I've tried to
use Pidgin for a while, but Facebook would often stop working and only come
back to life a few days later.

------
AceJohnny2
_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?

~~~
hengheng
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.

~~~
phillc73
> ... persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function,
> synchronized unread/read statuses....

Across all my devices - Web, Linux, Android and FirefoxOS. No advertising.

Telegram - [http://telegram.org](http://telegram.org)

I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love
integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone
develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).

I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our
conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that
service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service,
but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free
voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.

[0] [https://jaconda.im](https://jaconda.im) [1]
[http://webcalldirect.com](http://webcalldirect.com)

~~~
Corrado
Telegram looks really interesting. It has an open protocol and API so it
should be easy to integrate with other systems; there is a libpurple port for
it[1]. Maybe Telegram could be a replacement for XMPP?

[1] [https://github.com/majn/telegram-
purple](https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple)

------
zamalek
Zuckerberg sure has been interesting this week:

> Developers please use our platform!

> Developers we are now going to obsolete any work you've done with the XMPP
> front-end.

Demonstrating a clear moving target is not how you attract developers,
Facebook.

~~~
LewisJEllis
It all reminds me of this post: [http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-
zuckerberg](http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg)

Facebook is trying to make the platform too good for startups to resist
building on. By the time something built on the platform emerges as a success,
Facebook can either heavy-hand them into an acquisition, or lock them out and
take away their momentum.

~~~
zamalek
It's as though they are trying to get everyone else to do their RND. You float
the risk and if it works they implement it. Genius, really.

~~~
smrtinsert
The latter seemed obvious to many people though. I think a lot of people ran
with that risk anyway in hopes of becoming an acquisition.

------
Steko
We need two things. The first is a piece of software or robot that can just
keep browser tabs open along with iMessage/wechat clients whatever and then
reads it and transfers any message that comes thru one of these locked down
services to the second thing which is an open federated universal
communication service/app.

This app would have a slider at the top and if the slider is all the way on
the left you get 1-1 messages/mail from the most important people in your
social network and all the way on the right you get 1 to many things of people
you don't even know but you follow on Twitter/twitch/youtube/RSS/tv shows you
watch. This app makes money because people/advertisers can pay to increase how
close they are to you for one message and the money is split with the user who
also sets the cost. So for a million dollars you could call Jay Z who might be
sleeping but he's making 500k so what the hell, sure he'll listen to your
demo.

~~~
cvs268
...and fast forward few years and you have the Black-Mirror episode "Fifteen
Million Merits" happening world-wide.

How long do you think it will take for advertisers to realise that people will
watch "stuff" even if you don't pay them as long as they have nothing better
to do. Add to this the fact that major media outlets (movie productions, tv-
channels) will jump at the chance to broadcast ads as entertainment.

A very dark future awaits us...

------
ar7hur
This is a 11-month old announcement:

    
    
       On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API
       as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.

------
jacquesm
Everybody loves open standards until they are large enough to dictate their
own.

------
niravs
Alternative to your desktop client.

[http://www.goofyapp.com/](http://www.goofyapp.com/)

~~~
jklp
I found out about Goofy a couple of months ago and when I'm at my desk, I
don't have to use my phone at all for messaging (except for whatsapp).

Now I'd wish someone would do the same for Gmail chat / Hangouts, or maybe a
way to combine all the webviews into one ;)

~~~
xfalcox
Hangouts new chrome extension, the one with float circles, it's pretty good,
and works on Linux.

~~~
izacus
Unfortunately it doesn't work well on OS X and still requires me to run Chrome
in background next to the Firefox leading to alot of annoying horrible window
switching issues (for some reason chrome apps tend to get stuck in background
when alt-tabbing, sometimes it just hangs, burns alot of memory for a really
simple interface....)

~~~
72deluxe
All those "web apps" that were meant to be coming to the desktop and the
flurry of excitement when browsers started adding the ability to add shortcuts
on the desktop to a "web app" seems to have died down, and with good reason I
think! Some people don't want to be sat with a browser open all day. Given
that browsers are turning into mini-OSes themselves, it's irritating as they
don't fit into the OS window management system easily (like awkward
popups/alerts).

------
fenesiistvan
Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used?

[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt)

-based on open standards (SIP)

-supported by most VoIP servers (so we have full interoperability between vendors such as Cisco, Huawei, Siemens, Voipswitch, Mizutech, Jitsi and others)

-simple and extendable

-lots of free services, free/open source software. You can also host your own or integrate into your company PBX

In the previous years, we always see the same path for messaging applications:

1\. Startup company add messaging based on open standards
(SIP/IRC/XMPP/other?)

2\. One the company has significant user base, switches to a non-standard /
proprietary protocol

Already happened for Skype, Yahoo, Google, Facebook

~~~
zmb_
>-simple and extendable

It's the first time I hear anyone describe SIP as "simple". If you printed out
all the SIP specs, you'd probably have a pile close to a meter high. Among the
protocol crowd (including IETFers) SIP is often regarded as an example of
protocol design having gone off the rails in a spectacular fashion. It has
been repeatedly beat in the market by proprietary protocols that do things
better (e.g., see the mess SIP NAT traversal ended up as compared to Skype).

~~~
fenesiistvan
Yes, the SIP protocol is not so simple. However a lot of well working
implementations already exists (source code, libraries, ready to use
software). The core messaging in SIP (RFC 3428) is extremely simple to add as
it is just a single method (MESSAGE).

Adding presence and other funny things with the SIMPLE protocol family is
another subject. (However the basic presence is also very simple ...the
complications comes when you wish to add file transfer and other fancy
things).

But these can be used as an extra so at least the for chat you are fully
interoperable with all other vendors.

------
zobzu
quick, deprecate all the things that are open.

the wave of openneness that started with the web is being extinguished
everywhere. mind you, one could improve XMPP, or come up with an open
alternative. But this is no longer the focus. Short term money and numbers
is/are the focus, as per pre-web companies.

This model always end up being bad for the masses of course, and only good for
a few.

------
dade_
I only realized XMPP support was ending a month ago, I am not sure how I
missed the notification but this just introduces a new way for me to miss
messages. I think the writing is on the wall for XMPP, even Cisco is now
working on Project Squared/ Spark and I expect will be killing off their
Jabber software (The tone from their collaboration SMEs has become quite
negative). Personally I believe WebRTC based technology can provide a much
better user experience and more powerful capabilities than XMPP. Further, as a
front end to SIP, it could be a great thing for interoperability, especially
with PSTN. However, it really looks like it is being used as an excuse to
create new walled gardens. Fortunately some carriers are migrating to IMS and
provide softclients for computers, tablets and smart phones (Rogers One
Number, and Telus Extend). This is the lowest common denominator, but I can
chat with everyone with SMS as well as make phone calls from whatever device I
choose. However, although technically possible, multiuser chat and presence is
still not available. So here we are 20 years later, and chat is more
fragmented than ever, but at least unlimited SMS is now common. AT&T and
Verizon are finally beginning migration to IP peering which opens the way for
video calling over the PSTN. I think there is an opportunity for carriers here
if they would get their act together. 6+ platforms (Skype, Hangouts, FB
Messenger, iMessage, BBM, SMS) really doesn't work for me.

------
kalessin
That sucks, I really liked using Pidgin/Adium with Facebook chat.

------
gwillen
I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front
page:

[http://hnrankings.info/9266769/](http://hnrankings.info/9266769/)

Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?

~~~
garethadams
Probably the fact that it was announced last April

------
rilita
IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to
make anything significantly better.

Why does a system with the following features not exist:

1\. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol

2\. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users
within a server )

3\. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C
or the like ) and some web language ( Python & Dynamic JS )

3b. Has a free open source server reference implementation

4\. Logging on the server indefinitely

5\. Is always encrypted ( end to end via public keys, so that clear data never
reaches the servers )

6\. Offline messaging

7\. Large file transfer with clean re-connection and continuation ( if neither
party has a publicly accessible port, payment/membership to the server would
be required to facilitate the transfer... )

8\. Random chat

9\. Group chat

10\. Utf8 for full multi-lingual use

11\. Index of users for finding other users

If someone would just create such a thing it would put an end to all the
stupid shifting from one system to another from year to year. I'm getting
tired of switching systems and reverse engineering shitty protocols in order
to continue doing the same thing with less features.

~~~
boomzilla
Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email
unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub-
seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be
responded later instead of NOW.

I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit
more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with
emails.

~~~
rilita
Email fails in the following ways:

1\. Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most
notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another.

5\. The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the
message itself

7\. Large file transfer via email is horrible and extremely limited

8\. No random chat support

9\. No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat )

10\. Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not
supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires
getting and using a font that supports the codepoints )

11\. No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't
count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is
used by all people using email )

12\. No real time messaging support. Inherent in the discussion is that chat
software is insant, not based on server polling.

~~~
rakoo
> Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most
> notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another.

That's hardly an email issue, that's a client issue. The mail protocol doesn't
care much about the content.

Also, you will find some people averse to using HTML email.

> The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the
> message itself

Again, that's not part of the email protocol itself, and as far as email
encryption goes PGP is pretty much the standard. The real issue here is
whether to use the sucky PGP/inline or the proper PGP/mime

> No random chat support

You mean randomly send an email to someone, without being invited ? That's
pretty much what spam is.

> No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat )

I don't see why cc wouldn't count, when combined with the various In-Reply-To:
and Refenrences: headers, you can build a very solid group chat history.

> Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not
> supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires
> getting and using a font that supports the codepoints )

Again, a client problem, but I'll agree that clients can lie on the actual
encoding that is used in emails. Mandating UTF-8 would be such a heaven.

> No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't
> count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is
> used by all people using email )

I don't understand. Why couldn't a server index your emails and extract your
contacts ?

> No real time messaging support.

Theoretically, you can (and should) run an MTA on your machine; you'd then
receive messages in real time

> server polling

Polling sucks, don't do it. If you don't have an MTA on your machine, at least
use IMAP IDLE. Disclaimer: I wrote this
([https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch](https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch)) to
automatically sync all my mails when there's something new.

------
kshitijl
A long time ago I worked on the modified ejabberd servers that provide this
service. A shame indeed.

~~~
hengheng
Do you see a realistical future for the protocol? How large would the
motifications have to be to reflect a "decent" feature set for the current
device landscape and user's expectations?

------
Havoc
I wish the entire Messenger went away - nothing but an extra FB annoyance
forced onto me.

~~~
thejosh
Turn off chat. Nothing is forced onto you.

~~~
Havoc
I never even turned it on. Since they split messenger off I can no longer read
read messages on my cellphone...without installing a separate app.
Functionality that worked perfectly fine previously until they decided to
disable to force messenger onto people.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-
messages/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/)

~~~
acdha
Can't you just open facebook.com in your phone's browser? I've been doing that
for a couple of years since noticing that it's both faster and more reliable
than the Facebook iOS app.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah its tedious though. So mostly I just decide it can wait till I get home
and have access to a computer.

~~~
traitorjoe
If you're on Android, you should check out Tinfoil for Facebook. It's a
wrapper for facebook's mobile page. I find it more useful than the regular
facebook app. You can also get notifications back using IFTTT.

~~~
Havoc
Thank you for the suggestion. I'll check out Tinfoil.

On the whole my FB interaction is fairly minimal and I expect social companies
to push the limits so to speak. Such is life. This particular case was just so
blatant that I can't help but react with "go shove it a place the sun don't
shine" (colloquially speaking).

If they added new functionality & put that into a new app...cool. But to strip
existing functionality, block it from existing users and add it to a new app
with extended privacy intruding permission...that is simply unforgivable in my
books. (FB employees reading this - and I know you are - see sun reference
above for exact instructions).

------
miduil
I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I
think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing
is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I
understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then.

So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure
'evilness'. They were probably facing various of problems with XMPP, and
already switched with their infrastructure from XMPP to their own
'inventions'. If their own development is already proven to be working, they
don't have a reason to stay at the expensive XMPP protocol.

[1] & [2]: I understand why XMPP can be nice to build into your applications
(there's even a social network based on XMPP), especially in the early stage,
but when you go big - or mobile, I guess the 'flaws' in the protocol are just
becoming annoying (Disclaimer I've no clue what I'm writing about) I wonder
why there is no better open protocol or standard for text chat, and if - how
can we encourage facebook & other giants to use it. I'm curious how tox [3] is
going to do in near future. At the moment, it feels like XMPP is the only open
chat solution, which no-one can touch since Pidgin, Adium & Gajim are all
broken (I'm still thankful for this tools!).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810)

[2]:
[http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

[3]: [https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page](https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page)

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
I read through some github discussions in the tox github page, and I can't
really shake the feeling that they don't know much security. Someone had a
question about the protocol design and about how secure it was, and the dev
just linked to NaCl and said "read the source here and you will see that tox
is secure".

It didn't really boost my confidence in their protocol design...

~~~
RaleyField
Can you link to the offending conversation?

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
[https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecommen...](https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecomment-35750212)

Not as bad as I remembered, but still... meh.

------
jonalmeida
To play devil's advocate, what part of the XMPP protocol is dated, that
doesn't allow Facebook and Google to continue using it? Maybe if there's a way
to update XMPP to include features that shared amongst these services, they
can fall back to using it?

~~~
yellowbkpk
The part where when you're using XMPP you're not on their website looking at
their ads.

------
0x0
So this is how they make it a platform? :)

------
ipsum2
Is there any other way to work with Facebook Chat, now that XMPP is gone?

~~~
grandalf
Directly via the graph api. Simpler than xmpp.

Someone recently posted a graph api chat example.

~~~
MBlume
Do we know if Adium/pidgin are likely to update to use that API, or is it too
early to say?

~~~
baudehlo
Someone will build it. But it still just adds another proprietary API to the
arsenal. Ugh.

I echo other sentiments here: what exactly is broken about XMPP that companies
keep moving away?

~~~
timonovici
Somebody already said it: while using the chat through a different client than
their web chat, you're not looking at their ads, you're not installing their
proprietary mobile app, and so on.

------
jamespo
Another stab between the shoulder blades for those of us who like to live in
the command line.

------
edem
Is there an alternative to Pidgin in this regard? I only use Facebook to chat
with my friends (over Pidgin) and I don't want to touch their website if
possible.

~~~
pavelgavlik
I would be also interested in Messenger integration in Adium (It uses same
library as Pidgin.).

------
dorfsmay
Considering that they never opened it to federation, does it even matter?

~~~
wl
Desktop XMPP clients can no longer be used to chat on FB. That matters to me.

------
klekticist
Is there any alternative API? That is, if I'm interested in creating something
that interacts with Facebook chat, am I now out of luck?

Thanks.

~~~
bdcravens
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722)

------
luxpir
Note to those setting up new XMPP accounts: DuckDuckGo has a solid XMPP
server[7] available for public use. They do their damnedest to protect privacy
also, from what I understand.

That'll be all.

\--

[7] [https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-
jabber](https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber)

------
vezycash
If you "follow the money," then this move makes sense. This is simply a move
to display ads to every person using Facebook chat. (Facebook's not happy that
they couldn't show ads to those of us using pidgin et al)

------
Podeau
Let's hope for an official desktop client of Messenger...

~~~
72deluxe
Will it need the endless list of permissions like it does on Android? It seems
to want access to my entire phone, life, brain patterns and toilet usage
patterns.

In all seriousness, there is no indication as to what a desktop app is
accessing or doing, and given the extensive "fingers in all pies" access that
the Android one has, I wouldn't be quick to install a Facebook native app on
my desktop!

------
shmerl
Another one turns sour. But FB server was never federated anyway, so good
riddance.

------
pikzen
Welp, time to register an account on jabber.org

I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even
displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of
thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally
deprecate it. Pidgin will probably see a sudden surge of bug reports.

~~~
simoncion
In my experience (as of about a year ago) the jabber.org servers are -I guess-
seriously overloaded. Frequent disconnection or failures to login were the
norm for my @jabber.org account. If I had to guess, I would bet that they're
under frequent "attack", but I really have no idea.

Does anyone have any more recent information on the health of jabber.org's
XMPP service?

~~~
jcbrand
I think jabber.org is indeed overloaded and they don't accept new
registrations since 2013.

See my answer to the GP about available servers.

