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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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