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Comment by adtac | Hacker News Reader

I'll never completely trust a software product, especially communication ones. However, I'll blindly put all my money on protocols. A protocol is indestructible, it's just a document. It doesn't need VC funding to keep servers alive, it doesn't need advertisements, it doesn't need ridiculous growth benchmarks, it doesn't need anything. The beauty of protocols is that you're free to write your own client and server to have end-to-end control. IRC is a perfect example. I can't count the amount of client and server software, but they all interact with each almost perfectly.

That's why email will continue to exist forever. And that's why email is so versatile.

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I'd hardly say email works perfectly. It's very lossy due to spam prevention. Running your own email server that's trusted by others isn't easy. Whether data is encrypted or not is hit and miss.

It's less terrible than some other alternatives, that's all.

There are organizations and tools to solve those problems, and when they fail there’s always an incentive for something else to take its place while maintaining interoperability. The key point of protocols is that they richly reward diversity.

Efficient implementation of a protocol can be patent encumbered.

While a protocol exists forever, implementations mightn't, and there are many failed protocols. But can endure through network effects.

It is theoretically possible though, that if you find a usecase for a protocol that happened to be not used for a hundred years, that you implement it and then use it. Not even the document about the protocol is necessary if you remember it well enough.

And a part of the self-responsible philosophy is also that "there is no implementation" is not even an excuse. As long as there are free programming languages and affordable computers (I.e. a raspberry pi) then you can very well create your own implementation. It might take years to even start due to the requirements to learn programming, but it's not impossible at all.

I meant: a communications protocol that no one else uses is as useful as one telephone.

More like a notebook. You could for instance use the email format to store your diary entries, or a todo list, or an index of useful links, etc. even if nobody else uses the standard anymore.

Matrix protocol is the first thing that comes to mind, here.

> I'll never completely trust a software product, especially communication ones.

Since being frustrated with all the current major social networks, I've been playing around with an idea for a semi-decentralized/semi-federated chat service (like IRC but not quite), but it's just in my head for now.

Can someone recommend any sites where one can put up the seed/initial draft for an idea for others to collaborate on and add to? GitHub?

Your post is a pretty good description of XMPP in my eyes. What would you make different from that?

XMPP is pretty awful for practical communications these days. It can, with enough extensions and clients, do all the things other protocols do, but by and large weird stuff is broken.

Pure communications protocols are starting to feel like a losing game for me these days - the world is so carved up and walled again that I really need someone to build a new Trillian that instead of speaking protocols, hooks directly into the UI widgets on my desktop and phone so unify my view of communications and let me inject features (the only one I want being OTR messaging and I guess let's bring Zmodem back so we can stuff binaries to each other).

The state of XMPP seems no better or worse than that of any other open protocol that has been implemented by multiple parties over several decades. They have all become pretty bad with all kinds of weird ways in which things were tacked onto them.

> XMPP is pretty awful for practical communications these days. It can, with enough extensions and clients, do all the things other protocols do, but by and large weird stuff is broken.

It is practical if you use modern clients. For example I replaced Hangouts with Conversations.im for all my family members and they are very happy with it.

> XMPP is pretty awful for practical communications these days. It can, with enough extensions and clients, do all the things other protocols do, but by and large weird stuff is broken.

So why not just fix the broken parts, instead of inventing hundredth messaging protocol that will be forgotten in a year?

Because the broken parts are things like “having multiple clients receiving messages at once is an optional part of the protocol that must be supported by every client you use”. Connecting a new client to your account can break your other clients if you’re not really careful to ensure it supports all the features you want.

You then need to pick a server that supports everything you want, since things like a mailbox for when you’re offline are optional extras. Integration with mobile push services so that XMPP doesn’t kill your phone’s battery is an optional extra that is marked “experimental”.

A result of the near-death of XMPP, that I’ve discovered recently, is that there is no trustworthy iOS client that supports OMEMO - e2e encrypted communication is table stakes now, and XMPP can’t provide that to me in a manner that is usable for me.

I’m general, if you can find a server that provides what you want, and a desktop client that provides what you want, and you have no use for mobile communications, XMPP as it stands is probably as fine as it was two decades ago - but we have these things called smartphones now, I don’t want to be bound to a desk in order to stay in touch with my friends and partners, and I don’t see XMPP defragmenting any time soon.

Just out of curiosity but have you tried Chat Secure?

https://chatsecure.org/

I haven’t, I don’t really trust it for some reason I can’t quite tell.

> What would you make different from that?

I haven't fully thought it through and I'm not even sure if it would be viable in practice, but it involves BitTorrent + Magnet URIs.

> I've been playing around with an idea for a semi-decentralized/semi-federated chat service (like IRC but not quite), but it's just in my head for now.

Have you taken a look matrix.org? Out of interest: What would you do differently?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099453

a protocol is merely an agreement, no?

That's the point though. Anyone is free to implement it, anyone can interoperate with it, and anyone can publish improvements to it. Dependence on a protocol instead of a service or piece of software directly facilitates decentralization and user freedom.

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