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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

What a sad day.

A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps.

(Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)

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XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.)

I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.

Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps.

(Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)

> not even pretending to support consumer choice

By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it.

Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business.

That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.

I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.

WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.

Yeah, I've never understood this. I've seen it now-and-then when installing WA for family members, but I (and they) have never, ever had to pay for it after using it for multiple years.

It's free since Facebook bought them. I've had Android friends mention payment screens are still on their WhatsApp though.

It was free before Facebook brought them too. It just nagged people to pay once a year, but if one didn't pay, it just kept working.

What about Comcast? What about airlines?

s/Customer/Citizen/ and you've hit on a large portion of the problem with representative democracy.

When someone raises this concern, I ask who hosts their personal email. 30-50% use a legacy free Google Apps account or Gmail. When I ask why, it's a variation on "because FastMail costs ~$40/year."

Of the rest, more than half host their own MX. While that's totally reasonable, it means the percentage of people willing to pay just $3/month to be a customer is even smaller than it seems. And $40/year is the cheapest that one could ever hope "being a customer" would cost.

So, lots of people say they want to be customers, but even when doing so is close to free, very few actually do.

(Nothing wrong with using Google because it's free, only while concurrently claiming to want to be a customer. I agree with your point and I'm a happy FastMail customer. I'm amazed FastMail can make a profit at $40 and it's a huge credit to them that they can.)

> It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place...

What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence?

Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)

I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response: "XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices." This capability was indeed one of the major selling points of Apple's messaging system in the most recent iOS & OS X releases. If XMPP cannot keep track of multiple clients then that is a huge flaw in todays mobile world.

Unfortunately it is not true. XEP-0280 [0] (Message Carbons; since 2010) forwards your conversation to all your online clients, and XEP-0313 [1] (Message Archive Management; since 2012, but only recently implemented) allows a client to "catch up" with the history when it goes online.

[0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html

[1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

Whatsapp never supported this "fundamental feature" and is globally the most used messenger in "todays mobile world" by a wide margin.

Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)

A closed proprietary non-interoperable extension on XMPP.

> I think the flaw was mentioned in the first sentence of the parent's response...

We can speculate all we want, but this just leads to confusion. :)

While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.

All these problems have been solved in XMPP years ago, and there are some clients fully supporting the mobile experience and usage of multiple clients.

On the Desktop, Swift and Gajim come to my mind, on Android Conversations is getting really awesome (and yaxim, which I am the author of, supports the basic multi-client/mobile use case you are interested in).

That said, the XMPP protocol is not perfect, and it is lacking some important elements for a 2010+ mobile chat developer, but considering that it was initially developed in 1999, that mobile chat is only one of its many use cases, and that there are extensions covering all you have asked for, the critique is not appropriate.

[0] http://swift.im/swift.html

[1] http://gajim.org/

[2] http://conversations.im/

[3] https://yaxim.org/

That's exactly the problem, though. There are so many extensions that it's about as much work finding out which ones are even needed and how they interact for your case (in this case the replay) as is implementing, say, a good chunk of IRC.

And no, I'm not exaggerating, I've done both and decided that writing XMPP clients is not for me a long time ago.

Addendum: I really love XMPP, but I do think the many many extensions have hurt it more than one defined spec. And yes, I know it supports many use cases, but I simply only care for 1:1 and multi user chat.

You are right. The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently preparing to create a list of "must-have" client and server XEPs for certain use cases, like Instant Messaging or IoT. This will hopefully make the path easier for future application developers.

Just for the record, we are also working on a next-gen XMPP client, with decentralized blogging, file sharing, end 2 end encryption and all, and planing to do an Android port. Other projects like Movim also do similar things too, XMPP is definitely very alive these days.

Sending message to other devices is managed by message carbons which is in last call for being a standard XEP, and support is becoming more and more common.

XMPP is all but deprecated, very active, working well, with a large ecosystem. But is really badly known by most of people(I have by the way started a series of article to explain it: http://www.goffi.org/tag/talk_xmpp).

It's really difficult to be heard these days, but there is a new wave in XMPP world (check our project: http://salut-a-toi.org or movim: http://movim.eu).

Is there any way to handle message histories that survive the XMPP server (ejabberd) being restarted?

At the moment all the MUC room histories vanish if I need to restart ejabberd which is a farce in a cloud world...

And message carbons work, but since ejabberd only seems to support a single auth token meaning that if users connect with multiple devices they can't actually log out of only a single one without pulling the plug on all connected devices.

Are these only ejabberd issues or issues in the XMPP specs?

BTW this is for realtime chat on for an app, nothing federated... I'm open to non-XMPP options too.

> Is there any way to handle message histories that survive the XMPP server (ejabberd) being restarted?

Message Archive Management (XEP-0313) is supposed to do that.

> And message carbons work, but since ejabberd only seems to support a single auth token meaning that if users connect with multiple devices they can't actually log out of only a single one without pulling the plug on all connected devices.

Not sure to understand: if you disconnect a device, all the other devices with the same jid are disconnected? If so, it's definitely not normal, and not a spec issue. I'm also surprised to see ejabberd having this behavior, you should talk to the dev team.

> Message Archive Management (XEP-0313) is supposed to do that.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

> if you disconnect a device, all the other devices with the same jid are disconnected?

No, not on disconnection - I can't seem to find a way to tie multiple auth tokens to a single user (one per device) to allow them to log out on different devices individually. At the moment logging out one device would disconnect all clients.

XMPP is all but deprecated...

Just a short English usage note: "all but" means something like "almost". Judging by the rest of your post, you probably mean "XMPP is far from deprecated" here.

yes indeed, I'm not a native speaker as you can guess.

Thanks for the correction :)

I usually read "X is all but Y" as "X is Y in all but name", but there are subtle distinctions that could be hard for a non-native speakers[1] to grasp without knowing about them.

1: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9967/all-but-idio...

My understanding is that it is not the clients that are the problem but rather there is patchy support in open source XMPP servers to utilize the new mobile friendly features.

[1] - https://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/protocols/

[2] - https://prosody.im/doc/xeplist

[3] - https://github.com/esl/MongooseIM#features-and-supported-sta...

Not true, XMPP does have that feature and there are multiple clients which implement this. It works amazingly well. It's not an extension, but part of the standard.

Example:

http://conversations.im/

I blame Apple[1]. Google's chat was free, but what happens when you have a free and open protocol, and your competitors don't? They consume your chats, but you can't consume theirs. Soon, your chat software can't compete. Apple has repeatedly chosen the path or proprietary when they could do open. They are Microsoft from the 90's with a better PR department.

1: I have little evidence beyond what looks obvious, but that could definitely be wrong. I'm open to new information proving me wrong.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

In 2010 Jobs promised "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."

Afaik it didn't happen because of patent issues.

Patents prevent you from documenting, what is already documented in the patents ?!? I do however recognize the usage of the open standard would be limited by this. But one has options: other users could get a license, or one could try to change the protocol, to be able to avoid (some) patents, allowing both the patented and non patented way.

To me it just feels like they just don't care enough.

Party A may have an agreement or indemnification clause from patent holder B, but they may not have the right to extend that to other parties. So when C comes along and implements party A's new thing, they leave themselves open to lawsuits from party B.

Also, patents do not have to document everything. You can leave out some trade secrets, as long as the patent itself documents enough to prove it's a novel invention.

Apple has supported XMPP since back when Messages.app was still called iChat. The XMPP support is not great, like most OS built-ins, but it works. I'm still using it to chat on Facebook. If Google hadn't dropped support for XMPP, I could chat with Google users too. I fail to see how Apple is to blame.

I'm surprised Facebook Chat still works for you? My understanding (and others' experience, from a quick Google) is that XMPP Chat has been disabled since earlier this year: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat They only supported exactly as long as they needed to to gain market share.

And Apple gets pretty much zero kudos from me for client XMPP support. iMessage is a proprietary walled garden; client-only XMPP support is simply their one-way valve to get people into their network and only ever had any worth because Facebook and Google used to support XMPP.

I was surprised too, but it works, minus offline messages. (I am using it right now). Do you really think Facebook ever needed the market share from XMPP? I've always assumed that Apple and Facebook only support XMPP because they use it internally (engineers being engineers...)

> And Apple gets pretty much zero kudos from me for client XMPP support.

I guess we have different expectations. Apple is a company that sells me client hardware/software. I use Mail to connect to standard IMAP servers, I use Messages to connect to a standard XMPP server and Facebook. You can apparently even buy Apple's XMPP server through the Server app on the App Store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_Server The one thing they don't offer is a single, centralised XMPP server. That's not really an active attack on the standard, though.

Anyway, I live in a completely different filter bubble than you and your sibling poster - XMPP never had any momentum at all around me, so I can't really speculate on how it died.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Apple supports XMPP, in that they read it, but they don't publish to it. Google publishing to XMPP allowed Apple users to read gchat, but nobody else could read iMessage. This provided an advantage to Apple at cost to Google (why use gchat when iMessage lets you do both?) The result? Google proprietarizes gchat so they can compete.

Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.

I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop).

It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun.

These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion.

I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(

>I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well

Matrix (http://matrix.org/) is getting there. It does work well, though it's still in early (and active) development.

> I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS)

You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use.

"Have you got whatsapp?" No "Do you use Kik?" No etc.

Of all the systems to transmit messages, SMS is probably the least proprietary.

Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?

> Do you even need to ask your recipient what carrier they're using or do you just punch in their number and text away? Does it work regardless of what brand of mobile phone they have? Does it work even if their phone is temporarily disconnected from the network?

WeChat has all of those features, but I don't think anyone would regard it as other than proprietary...

The SMS protocols are indeed not proprietary (all the specs are online) but you'll either need a contract with an aggregator or with every mobile network operator you'd like to send traffic to. Not very handy. :)

> [SMS] is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.

Except for when it does not. More often than not carriers don't return the correct status codes, marking messages as delivered when in fact the recipient does not even have SMS enabled in their contract. This gets even worse with international messages that can be routed through multiple carriers' networks until they reach (or don't) their final destination.

Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests.

Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.

Don't they already? Gmail was the embrace-extend phase. Now we are into extinguish. Try setting up your own email server, it will be marked as spam by most major webmail providers.

They still play good with the other few large email services. But with every year using google apps for business is becoming more and more obvious choice from economical POV. In fact I've myself recommended quite a few companies to "just use Google apps".

I guess it just takes time too switch phases.

I use my own server, and I can't say that everyone is marking me as a spam. With correct setup and a little bit of good history gmail works fine for me. I removed SPAM label from my mail in Gmail and asked few friends to do the same. Now my mail isn't marked as spam in gmail. And for yandex.ru and mail.ru it worked out of the box.

I don't think Gmail would be able to block "own" email servers, because how would you tell them apart from company servers or web sites that send out confirmation e-mails or "forgot password" e-mails?

They do however require your server to be properly set up, with a correct reverse DNS etc. And Hotmail/Live mail does the same.

Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps.

But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else.

edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets

It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain.

At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…

Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?

Permanent user bans: http://androidcommunity.com/whatsapp-issues-permanent-ban-on...

I you can hack other's people accounts, it seems a good opportunity to force people out of WhatsApp. Just hack a guy's phone and connect him to WhatsApp through a third party client, get him permanently banned, and voilà!

Actually we see attempts to extend libpurple with many recent protocols. For instance telegram works on pidgin AFAIK, and I could recently see se a Tox plugin.

Clearly we cannot play a fair game with the closed whatsapp, but hacking cannot be stopped or forbidden.

After all, it was always like that. If you go back of 10 years al "regular people" had MSN and similar stuff, and we were IRCing. As a hacker, you migth feel sad, and think openness lost the war. IMHO the only difference is that nowadays we have much more "regular people" than before. They were simply sms-ing before they could access whatsapp.

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