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Comment by half-kh-hacker | Hacker News Reader

I think XMPP is a really good contender in the non-centralized personal-and-public messaging space. It doesn't look like an insurmountable effort from one person to support the XEPs required to create a competent chat application, unlike my impression of Matrix.

I think a nice, lean-but-glossy desktop client (we already have Conversations on mobile) would be really good for the platform. It's a lot easier to fight network effects if the end-user-experience is tangibly better (and you can do a LOT better than the current incumbents that are Slack and Discord.)

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That statement doesn't reflect the sad state of XMPP clients available nowadays.

I used to run my own XMPP server for years before moving on to Matrix and the reality was that the only good client was Conversations for Android. There wasn't a single one for Linux desktop that felt modern and up to speed with the latest XEPs.

And let's not even mention trying to get multiple clients supporting the same history with encryption enabled, that was super chaotic.

I'm really glad I abandoned my XMPP server in favor of Matrix. Matrix is modern and it just works and setting up a Synpase server is way easier than setting up a Prosody server.

When was "nowadays"? Gajim and Dino are definitely as decent as any native apps available for Matrix.

Sorry you feel that way about Prosody. If you have specific feedback we're always looking to improve the setup experience.

Snikket (briefly mentioned in the post) is an attempt to bundle everything you need for a modern communication server into a single package (e.g. automatic certs and stuff that you need for audio /video) out of the box. Maybe it sounds like it would suit you more.

I don't feel negative towards Prosody, Prosody is an awesome project.

My criticism is about XMPP in general and its ecosystem.

I stopped my XMPP server a few years ago, Dino was still in its infancy. It's good to see that the client is reaching some maturity but then, looking at the supported XEPs I can see that MAM is not supported for group chats:

- https://github.com/dino/dino/wiki/Supported-XEPs

Fortunately Matrix and the respective clients have been evolving quite well, so I don't see the need of going back to XMPP.

I stopped my XMPP server some 7..9 years ago after seeing loads of spam in MUCs.

The fact that Gajim is the best desktop XMPP client says more about how bad desktop XMPP clients are than how good gajim is. Dino is just very recently getting good enough to use, but it seems like it will be too little, too late.

And that's without talking about the elephant in the room of iOS. 5 years ago my workplace moved from XMPP to mattermost. There was a list of features desired by people; 7/8 could have been solved by updating ejabberd and telling people to switch clients, but iOS support meant switching away.

How come there hasn’t been a single really good implementation of it (besides defunct google chat), with presence, synchronized read receipts etc in the past decade?

Yes, there has: https://conversations.im/

EDIT: more to read:

https://blog.wirelessmoves.com/2020/05/xmpp-voice-and-video-...

https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternat...

There are several Matrix projects that are quite full-featured and were built by a ~single person. Leveraging an appropriate SDK makes it feasible.

If you use an SDK, you're not implementing the protocol or any XEP, and therefore it's not a testament to how easy that is to do.

That's true, but then again, if everyone uses a small set of SDKs that are robust and known to be compliant, isn't that a strictly better situation? Why is it important to reimplement the standard itself from scratch?

Better situation yes, better protocol no.

True, though it doesn't imply it's a worse protocol either.

Most of them in alpha state, with some functionality - read not all XEP implemented ;)

Sure, but that is not unlike the XMPP/XEP situation. That's pretty much unavoidable and comes down to the responsibility of the client. It's natural that there will only be a few full-featured clients since those require a lot of effort with either Matrix or XMPP.

That's exactly what I'm saying. XMPP got attacked a lot because of how XEP support was lacking in certain clients, but was implemented in others, yet nearly every federated system out there has the exact same, inevitable problem - email, Matrix, ActivityPub are no exceptions.

I think XMPP got attacked not because of the fragmented ecosystem of clients, but because the standard itself (in the sense of the complete set of XEPs in existence) got fragmented. As far as I know, multiple competing/overlapping XEPs were not an uncommon situation.

Compared to this, the Matrix standard(s) have thus far been able to maintain a certain kind of coherence (IMO), allowing for at least a vision of what a complete implementation of a server or client should look like. The standard is versioned so that you can aim for support of a particular version instead of a pick-and-choose subset of functionality. Also, part of the Matrix's coherence story probably lies in the fact that there is an "official" set of clients in the form of the Element clients.

Ultimately, you cannot prevent others from writing incomplete servers or clients. But you can show what the goal looks like and have other implementations approach it asymptotically.

There have been significant efforts to reduce this kind of fragmentation and to outline which XEPs a client or server developer should focus on, given a certain target application.

We are reviewing the most important specifications on a yearly base and provide recommendations in the form of Compliance Suites with different profiles like Instant Messaging, Mobile etc.:

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0443.html

That's great info, I wasn't aware of this. Thanks!

> It doesn't look like an insurmountable effort from one person to support the XEPs required to create a competent chat application, unlike my impression of Matrix.

Could you explain how you got this particular impression?

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