Comment by tiagoespinha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiagoespinha | Hacker News Reader

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> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.

To me it feels like the open standards never really kept up with the times, which in a way paved the way to walled gardens by the giants (and, in case of Slack, not so giants) to fill the gap which the open standards refused to fill.

I mean, sure IRC is awesome, text-only, channels, but emojis are limited to ASCII, inline GIFs are non-existent, and file-sharing (and/or storage) is rather clunky from what I remember from the old times.

And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling (or at least it didn't last time I checked) and it's not very surprising that companies just capitalize on that and make their own platforms.

Don't take me wrong though... it creeps me out how the company where I work trusts Slack with reams and reams of confidential documents, but I guess it's convenient to an extent which no other platform is.

> And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling

The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler problem than email spam.

I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players (Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc.) at least at text chat level.

XMPP is a bit complex, and suffers from some problems derived from too much flexibility. The mandatory part of the protocol is too small. This could be fixed by creating a meta XEP that lists all XEPs needed by modern clients.

However, it's a very capable protocol. Just see how nice conversations.im is. It doesn't even use GCM, and both latency and energy usage are fantastic.

Such a meta XEP exists already: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html#im

If you use a client that conforms to the Advanced Client requirements of the IM and Mobile Compliance Suites (with a similarly up-to-par server), you will have a very good experience.

Recommendations for good clients for desktop systems? Maybe my google-fu is particularly weak today, but I couldn't find a clear statements which clients outside conversations.im fullfill those (obviously only the IM suite, since mobile wouldn't apply)

https://gajim.org/ tends to be best for desktop (binaries exist for most desktop OSes).

For macOS, you may want to try Adium or Psi. Or you can use https://movim.eu/ which, though a web client, has fairly good feature support as well.

I second Gajim especially 1.0.0 version that looks good. There is also https://dino.im but that's still in alpha.

thanks you two, will give Gajim a try!

Remember to install some essential plug-ins (OMEMO, HTTP Upload, URL image preview, etc.) for the best experience :)

The problem is that selection is still limited if you factor in OMEMO support (end-to-end encryption):

https://omemo.top/

And this is what happened back in the day. AOL was forced to add interoperability with competitors. But our government today is unwilling to step in front of corporations on behalf of the people.

HN readers don't all have the same government. I assume you mean the US one. The EU has in some cases proved to be willing to confront corporations and/or to defend some consumers right. Not always or in the most efficient way, but here's hoping that it will continue and improve on that path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission

I'm well aware, and really happy about the work the EU's competition commission is doing. Unfortunately, for US-based corporations, global change is unlikely to happen until the US steps in.

> I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players

Sounds good on paper, sure, but ultimately it will end up being a predictable bureaucratic mess, causing more harm than good:

a) The mandatory 'open' standard that gets produced will end up being designed by committees of management teams from 6-7 major companies, each with their own list of feature requests and no central 'vision'.

b) A lack of a cohesive strategy and (critically) a lack of real incentives by the members to partake will result in endless delays, slow moving technological progress, layers of old cruft that never gets removed, and toxic political infighting causing confusion among vendors.

c) The standard ends up being so complex and involved that it isolates other small/medium sized players (or large foreign players) from joining in, eliminating the 'openness' the original regulation envisioned and crippling competition.

d) Ultimately reduces the ability for developers to get paid via monetization and grow via capital investments in the US, as non-regulated open-source projects (or foreign private apps) gain a major advantage of not having to be forced to use the standard. Cannibalizing the market the big players spent so much time/money building.

It's not just about good intentions and spotting a tough problem, it's about whether they can realistically and effectively achieve the end goals...

TLDR: open-source and the global nature of technology, lack of incentives, design by committee, regulatory agencies staffed by the very same companies it's regulating, etc, etc will result in the crippling of innovation and harm the quality of chat apps in the US.

I don't expect US to move a finger on the issue - all major players are american. However, something like USB charging was imposed by the EU with great success, ending a massive source of e-waste and proprietary cruft manufacturers imposed onto consumers. For EU, the economic motivations to force american companies open to European competition would be very tempting and the consumer benefits significant.

The takeaway from the USB success is not to design a new protocol by committee, rather pick a mature open standard - for textual chats there are several mature ones.

cornholio brings up a really good point. The fact that Whatsapp and other messaging apps have significant more European marketshare and growth rates than in other parts of the world could make an EU regulation's effect felt around the world, much like the USB one.

You mean like what happened to the web ? I'm a bit tired that every time someone suggests a new regulation/standard on HN, someone feel smandated to explain why regulations are bad and why neo liberalism is awesome.

Could we assume that we all understand the downside of regulations ? but that we still suggest some when the market fall into a bad optimum (bad for the consumer). If you don't agree that the market is stuck in a bad place, fine you can argue that.

What would be the advantage of adding tighter voice/video support to XMPP, vs just using links to sip: URIs? A major point of open standards is that you can use use them together with other open standards.

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