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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

The apps and most of the backend are open source too, not just the protocol.

The important distinction is that it's not decentralized like XMPP or email, which is a conscious decision: it would become very difficult to change it to add new features and they'd be left behind by closed-source competitors (see: XMPP).

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I see that it is a ton of wishful thinking and FUD on the side of Signal to claim that: XMPP is alive and kicking, has all the features one needs, runs everywhere, at scale, offers the same or better crypto, better privacy, better resilience and is more sustainable. When Signal will inevitably fail/turn against its users/enshittify itself or get acquired, all federated and P2P protocols will keep on going. For decades. That's the kind of communications systems we should be demanding in the present era, nothing less.

Yet I'd wager most HN readers have a grand total of zero XMPP contacts. Myself included. Proving the GPs point.

Because of what Google did with Google Talk. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

XMPP is underrated. A lot of people are imagining Pidgen in 2011, but the protocol has been extended, the actively developed clients are good, and it avoids the heavier parts of Matrix (both client and server side.) I wouldn't be surprised if Slack's replacement when Salesforce inevitably fucks it up will be XMPP based rather than Matrix.

Slack's replacement is going to be Teams. No corporation chooses internal chat clients based on interoperability or openness of source code.

"The protocol has been extended" has been XMPP's theme for decades, and also its problem. Name your favorite client, it probably won't have several extensions, and a lot of useful things require support on both ends plus the server. Lots of things that should be ubiquitous are not, including s2s auth. There needed to be more structure, like AIM back then or Signal now. Also the XML stuff is a nightmare.

Even if Google Talk kept XMPP, they weren't going to save it, cause nobody used Google Talk. Facebook was by far the biggest XMPP-supported platform (though it wasn't federated), and they stopped probably cause they didn't see enough clients. Even Slack supported XMPP for a while, did you use that?

My entire friend/acquaintance group used Google Talk in the late-‘00s.

I kicked out all the walled-garden apps like Signal and went standard XMPP only. I have a lot of XMPP contacts now. You just need to commit to it.

And have friends who are all willing to commit to it, too

Not really, my friends are still using proprietary apps besides their XMPP client.

Did you set up bridges for contacts on legacy networks?

Only Biboumi for IRC.

Is it really a wish if it's already come true? I can't name a single person who uses XMPP. If a federated chat protocol ever wins, it'll probably be something more modern like Matrix. At least there's email too.

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