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Comment by dminor | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is a decentralized social media platform - "Diaspora" but by someone who knows what they are doing.

Why do you say that the author knows what he's doing? If your statement is based his work on Jabber (now called XMPP), then I am somewhat concerned. Several design decisions make Jabber difficult to implement with no benefit to the use cases. My previous comments about Jabber design decisions are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071652

> Why do you say that the author knows what he's doing?

Jeremie Miller wrote a popular open source IM server and created a specification for the protocol which has been widely implemented in several different languages (Erlang, C, Python to name a few) for both client and server.

Many of the functions solved by XMPP (instant messaging, presence, federation) fit nicely into the distributed social network problem domain.

So that's why I have confidence that he knows what he's doing. Nits like "I don't like different XML namespaces" more or less miss the forest for the trees.

I agree that my previous rant was about nits, but these nits add up and act as a barrier to entry to development in the space.

You mention that XMPP is widely implemented on the server, but only a few of the implementations are actually any good. To make matters worse, some of the best server implementations are written in fringe languages (Erlang for example).

I think that XMPP would be more successful if it had been more developer friendly.

Have you looked at telehash (http://www.telehash.org), a much more recent project by the same guy?

I'm impressed by how elegant the protocol is. I hate XMPP, but telehash gives me faith.

XMPP? Knows what they are doing?

Does not compute.

Using document markup as a packet based message protocol is just perverse.

These type of comments are pointless. If you have a point to make then make it.

I think the protocol is actually quite nice, I have an aversion to anything XML but that's just a personal preference. Have you used it in development? It works quite well... I know it sucks for binary data but that's not what it's designed for.

edit: I made my comment before axod edited in the last line "Using document markup as a packet based message protocol is just perverse." I somewhat agree with his point so ignore my reply.

Yes I've written XMPP libs at the base level. It's mental. There's 15 hoops to jump through just to say "hello!", forms must be filled out in triplicate, several nested stanzas must be entered into. It's absolutely ridiculous at the protocol level.

I agree it's probably pointless, but I find it odd that XMPP is now apparently 'cool'. I thought it was commonly thought to be an abomination of the highest order.

deal with it, it's established at the RFC level so at this point I'd prefer XMPP to <insert proprietary protocol here>

Come on, some credit is due.. XMPP protocol is in production all over the place.

Windows is in production all over the place.

Cobol is in production all over the place.

Autocracy... okay, there was that whole Egypt thing, but you get the idea.

Agree. The phrase "from the creator of XMPP" never fails to make me cringe, for a variety of reasons.

It's a tribute to the simplicity of IRC that you can write a channel logging bot in like 20 lines of shell (https://github.com/acg/logbot).

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