XMPP is alright. It will never be perfect, but it keeps improving, and that's important.
Personally I believe more in having people be in control of their own communications than having ultra secure crypto. No crypto is going to help if a single actor can see all metadata or decide who is allowed to communicate.
Therefore I strongly believe in federation and allowing everyone to choose their client, service and server.
> But XMPP gives you another freedom. The freedom to choose your user experience. User experience describes the way we use something.
I don't think users care about the freedom to choose the UX. They just want a good UX and that's it.
> Slack in turn fails to provide a decent mobile experience.
According the ratings of app stores, users are pretty happy with them.
> PGP has been around in the XMPP community for several years but is currently being reworked into a more modern extension called XEP-0374: OpenPGP for XMPP Instant Messaging that promises to make the onboarding easier for novice users.
I don't get how something OpenPGP will make onboarding any easier for XMPP. New XMPP users who might have an automatically generated account somewhere, still start with an empty contact list. Onboarding is definitely the key issue for mobile XMPP.
A device-global push protocol isn't entirely useless, since the device OS can wake all the clients at once if it needs to, synchronizing network activity. But I agree it's a significant overhead if you're able to just hold open the TCP session, as well as concentrating yet more information into a single entity you don't get to choose.
Push messages on GCM are going through immediately. The push server is not queuing up messages to send them all at once. I admit that could be helpful but Google is not doing this either.
The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.
> XMPP just works everywhere. You only need one account to cater to all your instant messaging needs. If your workflow changes you just pick a different client.
AFAIK, this is painfully wrong and one of the main reasons XMPP struggles. Nearly all of the modern 'messaging needs' are provided by the kind of XEPs mentioned in the article. If you don't have an account with a server that supports all of those XEPs, your needs will NOT be met. There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either. The situation is atrocious from a user perspective. As far as mass adoption is concerned, this puts XMPP so far out of the league of centralized IM that it's eating twizzlers in the parking lot.
There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work. This lack of homogeneity between servers means users pile up in the 'better' servers, which is apparently the opposite of what federation is supposed to achieve (?).
What if you want the freedom to switch from the Conversations server to a different public server but maintain the same feaureset? Good luck with your Google searches. Keep a table of your relevant XEPs nearby!
I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity. In it's current state there is absolutely no way to convince the average user of XMPP's superiority. The experience is far too inconsistent. At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
> There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers.
That is completely untrue. First of all there are public servers that have exactly the same feature set like jabber.at second of all we are running ejabberd on conversations.im. ejabberd is open source can be run by anyone. You just have to do it. Granted the list of public servers with a full feature set is not as long as we'd like. But the best way of changing this is to run one yourself.
It's impossible to get reliably statistics in a federated system. (Which of course is the entire point.) but looking at the little data I have from people sending me bug reports over XMPP at seems that a lot of Conversations users are running their own servers.
The problem is not that the extensions are not implemented (Both prosody and ejabberd in fact support all the extensions Conversations does.) but that a lot of public servers out there are second class services for their operators and are not properly maintained. In that case you can either contact them and ask them to upgrade or ask yourself if you want to have an XMPP account on a provider who doesn't maintain their servers.
Matrix will hit exactly the same problem in a few years. The solution is certainly not to restart with a clean slate every few years and fucks to you if you wanted compatibility. That's Google's approach, where every few years they trash an old service and - maybe - replace it with a new one that works in a different way.
There's no simple answers to this. I can tell you it's absolutely not a protocol issue - the protocol issues are ensuring graceful degradation remains possible during advances, which XMPP does well - but a political one. Profile specifications, which indicate groups of XEPs which the community expects to be supported, are part of this. Certification might also need to happen. Maybe monetary awards, even.
One of the biggest things currently driving server implementors to get the XEP support, and server maintainers to deploy it, though, is folk like inputmice driving the market with Conversations.
Sorry, you haven't thought this through. As long as XMPP exists in a state where there are public servers with varying XEP support then adoption rates will always languish. A user would actually have to do considerable research to understand why features they've come to expect from centralized IM aren't working should they happen to choose the wrong server or client. Without a large degree XEP parity, XMPP has ZERO chance to ever compete with centralized IM. The average user simply won't put up with it.
Matrix has a shot because it's consistent right now. If they stay consistent, they will have an even larger shot.
> There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either.
False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
> everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers
No, you just need to use a server maintained by someone who actually maintains it.
> Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work.
Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
> I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity
Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No. I think publishing a new "XMPP Compliance Suite $year" XEP is better than throwing the entire thing out, in a couple of years when everyone suddenly wants a different feature set.
> At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
A clean slate which will be obsolete in just a few years, and will have to be invented from scratch all over again.
I think you missed the thrust of my argument which is that XMPP sucks from a _user_ perspective. A non-technical user perspective which is 90% of the users in the real world.
> False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
User don't care what the protocol can do. "How come persistent group chat isn't working? Ah, I'll just use WhatsApp"
> Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
This is dependent on the client. Does your client support that? Who knows? Users don't care about any of this.
> Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No.
There's no greater incentive for public server providers than the danger of having their user base get isolated from the rest of the network. That can be done through the protocol and is the only incentive that will actually _accomplish_ anything.
I'd be surprised if Matrix is obsolete in a few years. The difference between the Matrix and XMPP spec structure is simply that Matrix is a single curated monolithic spec rather than a set of XEPs. So there's only one true standard at any given point, at a given version (unless someone forks it). We've been evolving it quite rapidly so far, adding modules for the various different use cases out there (http://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.1.0.html#featur...), and I don't see that rate of evolution slowing down any time soon.
And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
> We've been evolving it quite rapidly so far, adding modules for the various different use cases out there [...], and I don't see that rate of evolution slowing down any time soon.
> And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
Are you saying you might end up in a situation where "fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common"?
15 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 45.5 ms ] threadPersonally I believe more in having people be in control of their own communications than having ultra secure crypto. No crypto is going to help if a single actor can see all metadata or decide who is allowed to communicate.
Therefore I strongly believe in federation and allowing everyone to choose their client, service and server.
I don't think users care about the freedom to choose the UX. They just want a good UX and that's it.
> Slack in turn fails to provide a decent mobile experience.
According the ratings of app stores, users are pretty happy with them.
> PGP has been around in the XMPP community for several years but is currently being reworked into a more modern extension called XEP-0374: OpenPGP for XMPP Instant Messaging that promises to make the onboarding easier for novice users.
I don't get how something OpenPGP will make onboarding any easier for XMPP. New XMPP users who might have an automatically generated account somewhere, still start with an empty contact list. Onboarding is definitely the key issue for mobile XMPP.
The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.
AFAIK, this is painfully wrong and one of the main reasons XMPP struggles. Nearly all of the modern 'messaging needs' are provided by the kind of XEPs mentioned in the article. If you don't have an account with a server that supports all of those XEPs, your needs will NOT be met. There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either. The situation is atrocious from a user perspective. As far as mass adoption is concerned, this puts XMPP so far out of the league of centralized IM that it's eating twizzlers in the parking lot.
There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work. This lack of homogeneity between servers means users pile up in the 'better' servers, which is apparently the opposite of what federation is supposed to achieve (?).
What if you want the freedom to switch from the Conversations server to a different public server but maintain the same feaureset? Good luck with your Google searches. Keep a table of your relevant XEPs nearby!
I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity. In it's current state there is absolutely no way to convince the average user of XMPP's superiority. The experience is far too inconsistent. At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
That is completely untrue. First of all there are public servers that have exactly the same feature set like jabber.at second of all we are running ejabberd on conversations.im. ejabberd is open source can be run by anyone. You just have to do it. Granted the list of public servers with a full feature set is not as long as we'd like. But the best way of changing this is to run one yourself.
1) They're not going to run their own server.
2) They're not going to bother researching which servers support Conversations entire featureset.
That's why XMPP is garbage for the majority users and why XMPP weenies will stay baffled as to why there aren't a flood of users using it.
There's no simple answers to this. I can tell you it's absolutely not a protocol issue - the protocol issues are ensuring graceful degradation remains possible during advances, which XMPP does well - but a political one. Profile specifications, which indicate groups of XEPs which the community expects to be supported, are part of this. Certification might also need to happen. Maybe monetary awards, even.
One of the biggest things currently driving server implementors to get the XEP support, and server maintainers to deploy it, though, is folk like inputmice driving the market with Conversations.
Matrix has a shot because it's consistent right now. If they stay consistent, they will have an even larger shot.
False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
> everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers
No, you just need to use a server maintained by someone who actually maintains it.
> Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work.
Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
> I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity
Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No. I think publishing a new "XMPP Compliance Suite $year" XEP is better than throwing the entire thing out, in a couple of years when everyone suddenly wants a different feature set.
> At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
A clean slate which will be obsolete in just a few years, and will have to be invented from scratch all over again.
> False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
User don't care what the protocol can do. "How come persistent group chat isn't working? Ah, I'll just use WhatsApp"
> Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
This is dependent on the client. Does your client support that? Who knows? Users don't care about any of this.
> Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No.
There's no greater incentive for public server providers than the danger of having their user base get isolated from the rest of the network. That can be done through the protocol and is the only incentive that will actually _accomplish_ anything.
And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
> And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
Are you saying you might end up in a situation where "fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common"?