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Comment by brunes | Hacker News Reader

What would truely make XMPP stick and be a killer app, would be if enterprise interoperability could be shown between apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Discord. The amount of friction that enterprise consumers like myself have to deal with because none of these things interoperate is immense. Making them interoperate at a basic level via XMPP does not seem like it would be overly challenging.

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Once upon a time, google chat (neé gchat) _was_ that killer app. For a brief time there was glorious federated communication between several IM vendors, self hosted open source servers, and gchat.

Then google killed it all by dropping xmpp/jabber support in gchat, and others soon followed.

I don't think there ever was federation support? Or maybe you were an earlier adopter than me, and talk of a time before they killed federation?

At one point with Apple’s Continuity I had Gchat, Facebook messenger and SMS on a single window in my MacBook.

Yes, but with only a single xmpp account, that federated access to gchat, fb?

Yes, at one point I ran my own prosody jabber/xmpp server and regularly chatted through it with friends who were gchat users. Even had presence (idle , busy, etc) support! It worked amazingly.

First they killed federation, then they killed xmpp support entirely.

but what if they don't want to interoperate with each other

Teams, Slack and Discord don't want to talk to each other. They want their own silo with their own users. XMPP, Matrix, or anything, for that matter, can't fix that.

You're looking for Matrix. XMPP wants nothing to do with 'enterprise' apps that rely on potentially backdoored encryption standards. The people who care enough to enable OMEMO on their chats aren't going to do so with the intention of undermining their communique for a slightly better level of compatibility.

Have you looked at Mio? https://youtu.be/0mAXRUgJtgg Basically does what you're talking about

Idea: market interoperability as a metaverse thing.

the technical challenge, or lack thereof, is not the reason why it's not done I suppose.

It has been done. Chat apps once did work together and you had multi client apps that would connect to everything. Then they slowly died off and became discontinued because people don't actually care that much about having multiple chat apps. Thanks to modern push notification services, you can receive messages from all IM services without having to have those apps actually running.

Reminds me how Slack killed off their IRC bridge...

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