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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue with XMPP is the myriad of XEPs (XMPP extensions) which are optional, causing excessive fragmentation.

Some clients are excellent, like conversations.im. The problem is accidental complexity. Perhaps a solution would be to have a meta XEP that aggregates a few basic XEPs and defines a minimum common denominator.

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There are attempts at creating an XMPP compliance suite[0], but the biggest problem is actually a lack of volunteers / money to improve the clients and servers. Conversations is driven by one full time developer, most other applications are hobby projects.

[0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0375.html

It was a real sad day when Facebook and Google decided that proprietary was the way to go...

The writing was on the wall before that, though. WhatsApp was eating everyone's lunch and Facebook / Google wanted to move faster and own the messaging space.

WhatsApp didn't exist yet

WhatsApp has existed since 2009, which preceded Google Hangouts by 4 years.

Afaik facebook was designed to be a closed walled garden from the get go and never offered interoperability despite using xmpp at first.

Google gtalk predates facebook and happened at different times, IIRC the change to a closed chat service was a reaction due to facebook abusing the openness to scrape contacts.

What kinds of skills would a volunteer need to be able to contribute?

What skills you have are laregely irrelavant; just find something that annoys you personally about [your favorite client here], dig in, fix it, and send in a patch. Or, if you're not a developer, use whatever skills you have, mock up a way that a UI component could work better and send it in, or write documentation, or simply file bug reports. Everything helps :)

Also, most people are introduced to XMPP in ways that don't let group chats work very well, so they think that's an XMPP problem, not the service's.

How is that not an XMPP problem?

I meant that "users perceive it as something XMPP can't do", so it's not a protocol-level issue, as the feature exists, but a branding and compatibility issue. Those, depending on how you define XMPP, are part of XMPP's problem.

Because it works fine with the right client.

I'd really appreciate more detail, here.

If everyone is using Conversations as their client, group chats work fine. Issues arrise when you introduce other clients into the mix ...

So Conversations has implemented a feature that isn't in the protocol, but important enough that when the feature doesn't work, users are turned off?

Or it's part of the protocol, but design decisions lead to client interoperability problems?

Maybe there's a third answer, but both of these are problems with XMPP.

It's part of the protocol, but many clients don't implement it correctly.

Multi user chats/chatrooms are part of the protocol though.

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