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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> XMPP, IRC

I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being open, federated and decentralised.

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XMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it. Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation, keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-user chat and Jingle (Voice-Over-IP).

As for IRC - yes it has been largely eclipsed by proprietary solutions. I chalk this up to the lack of a compelling, truly simple web front-end for it. For instance, Slack seems to imitate a lot of the feature of IRC - it would be easy enough for it to just be IRC underneath, and maybe it is. But as far as I know nobody ever wrote a true web client for IRC that was compelling enough for the mainstream.

Internally it's not xmpp, but instead an xmpp facing compatibility layer.

Interestingly WhatsApp is also a XMPP-based system, although totally closed and likely incompatible with other clients.

XMPP's federation is great, but it's a real pitas to scale up a single domain (long-lived connections, implementations typically assuming one node, dialbacks). The gtalk team had a really hard time with it. Http is a lot easier to scale.

Twitter originally had a chat interface. It's where most people I knew, used to use it - via pidgin. I think it was an AIM bot.

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