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Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see a federated chat app my tech illiterate family can download and use. Sure I have set some up to test out but the UX is terrible on all of them. Matrix was the most polished but still horrible compared to signal.

Everyone loves to rag on signal here it seems. They would rather something be correct in ideals than help the largest amount of people. It’s a strange and holier than thou stance to take in my opinion.

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I mean, there was a while there where XMPP-based and federated chat clients (particularly google chat, along with early facebook messenger) were becoming dominant, and were widely used by "normal people" without even knowing it was a thing.

So I don't think "it's impossible to make a non-shitty federated client" is really a valid argument. That's not to dispute real problems with wide-open federation or XMPP, because they absolutely exist, just that "the clients are hard to use" seems more an artifact of the resources of the people making them than anything to do with technical merit.

I wonder if some of what went wrong with XMPP was the big platforms (Facebook, Gmail) adopting it, then dropping it. Coupled with the rise of smartphones and the cloud. Previously you ran your chat app on a desktop PC and it stored your chat history/etc.

I imagine federated chat means more opportunities for your users to avoid seeing ads too... Just use someone else's server!

Were things like Google Chat and Facebook chat actually federated, or did they just allow for XMPP clients to authenticate and have some marginal functionality of the platform? If I was a member on some XMPP server, could I send a message to either platform without having a Google or Facebook account?

Yes, Google Talk federated with other XMPP servers: https://support.google.com/code/answer/55702?hl=en&ref_topic...

Neat, thanks for sharing!

>So I don't think "it's impossible to make a non-shitty federated client" is really a valid argument.

Perhaps not, but it's definitely a strawman.

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