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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Re-adding contacts is easy. Back in 2006 I used to manually prepare XML for injection into XML console in Psi in order to add all my Gadu-Gadu contacts to XMPP roster using transport. Now things like that can be easily automated thanks to XEP-0144. You could probably use XEP-0321 for it as well.

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Is it a joke? Well, I'll bite. You do understand how cryptic and unbelievably this sounds to common folks? And even if, as a tech person, I could do such kind of magic I simply don't want to. I believe software must be dead simple to use. If it isn't, it means the designers screwed up their job.

This comment wasn't targeted to "common folks", it was targeted to HN readers interested in XMPP. Common folks can use Google/DuckDuckGo and find one of the readily available scripts that already do that. Others can implement their own in 15 minutes. GP claimed that there's no automated way to do that, I just said that it's wrong.

Anyway, you won't be able to migrate your account to another provider at all when using most of other networks, and generally you shouldn't need to do that with XMPP as well (only in rare, special situations), so I really don't think that every user-friendly XMPP client out there needs to provide big fat "MIGRATE MY ROSTER" button.

> Common folks can use Google/DuckDuckGo and find one of the readily available scripts that already do that

This pattern of thought is why it still isn't the year of Linux on the desktop. Black squares containing only text scare people.

> Common folks can use Google/DuckDuckGo and find one of the readily available scripts that already do that

We seem to have quite different views about "common people".

It's only easy if servers and clients support those specs; I'm not aware of any that do, but at least they exist. Maybe it's worth updating them and pushing for adoption.

At least Psi and Spectrum do, and I think every major server does. I haven't chosen my clients by support of those XEPs and all of them happen to support at least one, so I suspect that at least one of them will be pretty commonly implemented these days.

In fact, to just one-time migrate your roster you don't even need any of them - you just download the roster from one account and push it to another. There are plenty of tools to do that on the Web. XEPs make it easy to keep them synchronized, or to "push" roster from one account to another without having to log in into new account with the tool you want to use.

Conversations definitely doesn't, and I don't see it in Psi. Can you provide a link? Maybe I'm just missing something.

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