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Comment by mrfregg | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but what caused XMPP to fail? Simply the lack of uptake or is there some other reason?

Google's embrace-extend-extinguish destroyed XMPP. They made their chat system XMPP compatible for a short time which caused many people to swap to their solution. When they ended support, most users simply stopped using XMPP.

Did you also notice that Google's messaging system pretty much died out around that point in favor of Skype and similar?

I used to see people mention GTalk all the time, but I haven't seen anything similar in years. No one has mentioned G+ or Allo. That decision by Google may have been the thing that killed its user base.

Hangouts (which I think GTalk turned into) still has some usage - certainly as a quick video conf call solution, and somewhat for text messaging. It definitely doesn't seem to have much of a future though since Google released a bunch of other competing chat applications.

It's unfortunate because Hangouts is still really awesome. It works really well for video chat (including group chat), but more importantly it works great with multiple devices. I can get a message on my phone, laptop or PC, and reply anywhere, with the conversation and notifications synchronized. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it's really nice to be able to just send someone a link from my PC, for example.

It looks like Telegram has multi-device support, but then this kind of thing scares me:

> Q: How are you going to make money out of this?

> We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.

> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram.

That's not very compelling in terms of investing my effort to switch.

No, it turned into Hangouts, which is alive and kicking, specially for companies using Google Apps.

But really only internally, at least in my experience

Even worse, Google never federated with encryption, then Hangouts killed group chats which were XMPP compatible. A few friends and I resisted with several XMPP accounts until they moved to Hangouts. Not to mention all the JEPs that solved the same problems as Hangouts that Google plain ignored for years.

The rumor[0] was that Google killed XMPP because Microsoft was doing 1-way federation (Microsoft would not broadcast availability status or typing indicators).

[0] http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie...

I've been running my email server for a decade without serious glitches. Setting up my own federated XMPP instance is much more problematic and people are already complaining about how hard email is.

I'd love to see an up-to-date tutorial that opposes my statement, eg. setting up prosody (or something lightweight) on debian (or similar) with multiple domains for multiple accounts, sending and receiving test messages from another XMPP hub, so if you know one, please link it.

> Setting up my own federated XMPP instance is much more problematic

Actually, I believe it's the contrary.

With email you have to obtain a valid TLS certificate, set up SPF, DKIM, and keep eye on the DNSRBLs so you're in good standing. And if Big Company's mail service suddenly decides they don't like you, it won't help. Oh, and spamassasin/rspamd/milter/greylisting/etc stuff so your email server doesn't get thousands of emails per day few weeks after some bot detects your host is listening on tcp/25.

XMPP has less adoption, spam exists but is much rare, so there's less stuff to do. Install a package, get a TLS cert, publish an SRV record (IIRC that's not even strictly required), and that's it. A bit fewer steps.

Not to say email is MTA+MDA combo (+some fancier LDA, +Sieve if you want more that a simple system) while XMPP is a single piece of software (unless you want transports or external extra services).

> XMPP has less adoption, spam exists but is much rare, so there's less stuff to do. Install a package, get a TLS cert, publish an SRV record (IIRC that's not even strictly required), and that's it. A bit fewer steps.

That's what I thought as well. Please link tutorial on this.

Just install prosody and open up the config file. It includes lots of comments and I believe there's even a web admin interface you can enable.

XMPP SRV record documentation can be found here, if you need to use it:

https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records

If you're finding the documentation to be insufficient, let me know, I might write something more detailed up.

Personally, I'm using ejabberd, but I wouldn't recommend it. Don't have any good tutorial links at hand, sorry.

I'd agree with /u/problems suggestion to try Prosody. http://prosody.im/doc/install + http://prosody.im/doc/configure + http://prosody.im/doc/dns#srv_records + http://prosody.im/doc/certificates are probably all you have to do to get it up and running.

This one's a bit minimal since it's designed to fit on a flyer, but it does contain what you need to know; install server of choice, get a TLS cert from somewhere, set DNS records if you want them, done. https://xmpp.org/images/promo/xmpp_server_guide_2017.pdf

See this essay for some insights: https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp.

Everyone[0] is using one of these.

None are XMPP or compatible with XMPP.

[0] I don't technically mean the entire planet.

Curious why you tossed Apple in there. In worldwide usage it's a fraction compared to the other three. (I feel compelled to state I use an iPhone in order to avoid this comment being interpreted incorrectly).

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