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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

We had universal chat applications & standards and interoperability in the 2000s. Pidgin (et al.) + libpurple allowed users to use a singular application for chat--even the proprietary protocols. We also had (& still have) XMPP from that era which many of the big boys like Google jumped on, killed, then jumped off (EEE?). Are we just repeating history (https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...)? There’s an XKCD about inventing yet a new standard despite us having good ones for decades…

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Given how many large chat systems are based on XMPP, it should be possible to select a set of standard extensions to interoperate with each other. Sadly, I don't see it happening.

True. But developers should push in that direction anyhow since it still means interop for those in that camp already… and considering how well those large systems have scaled, it’s a good idea.

This was never enough for me. On paper Pidgin did the trick, but you still had to remember which of your friends preferred which platform, you had multiple "friend" entries for the same person, many used silly pseudonyms that they certainly didn't go by IRL, you had no way to tell if your friends actually were monitoring each of their accounts (I uninstalled aim months ago, have you been sending me messages on it?), you couldn't have group conversations across networks without mental gymnastics or compromise, the features offered on each platform were inconsistent, both on their native apps and the features pidgin actually implemented.

That to me is not universal chat, that's just welding 10 chat apps into one, somewhat poorly.

That being said XMPP was well on the way to becoming something universally supported, and though the protocol itself was way more complicated and crufty than I'd like, it's a shame that Google particularly abandoned it for really no reason.

Since those services all died off my memory is a bit foggy, but I recall stacking contacts in one with Adium & being able to prioritize in that meta contact which service they provided. But I really only ever used it for two-person conversations so I had no experience with the group situation. Even still, a multi-chat app was a vastly better user experience than running several independent applications (with the cost of missing ‘advanced’ features & occasional outages as protocols needed to be reverse engineered & the proprietary providers had no incentive for backwards compatibility).

> Google particularly abandoned it for really no reason

What most annoying is seeing Big Tech now trying to write a new standard to comply with the EU instead of using the existing standard they abandoned that already has all the mileage & scaling looked at. Instead all the same hurdles will have to be overcome yet again, just like the current growing pains of Matrix meanwhile XMPP is still quietly holding strong for massive chat/presence systems.

I agree that it's better than using multiple applications, but today I just use one (for personal conversations at least, Slack for business and Discord for communities is a bit different), which is texting.

My texting is scattered. I’d prefer it to be all XMPP, but I engage with Signal, & Mattermost, IRC, & Matrix on a regular basis… & largely this is a result of me just quitting the other chat platforms that most are using here (LINE, Facebook Messenger) which has made communications more difficult for others. I could run gateway to puppet all those accounts which is a lot closer than Pidgin was at unifying it all, but I’ve been a bit lazy to set it all up (& if the common gateway tool wasn’t Python I’d be more thrilled to touch it).

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