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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Right now, I have installed on my phone:

* Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone.

* Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly)

* Viber, with a single contact.

* LINE, with a single contact.

I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps.

3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.

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It's a shame that XMPP didn't save us from this situation. My hunch is that the baseline featureset over federation was too low: no federated medsage history; MUCs are single point of failures.

We're trying to fix this with Matrix.org - folks frustrated with yet another communication silo might want to check it out and help us tear down the walls between these gardens. (obvious disclaimer: i help run matrix.org)

I was going to snarkily post the "Standards" xkcd - http://xkcd.com/927/ - but then I noticed that the sample chat on your homepage already has it.

Nicely played.

What's the 'federated message history' in this list?

The capability to get conversation history over several servers. In Matrix the conversation history is stored by all servers involved in the discussion, and thus it can be retrieved if your own server temporarily goes down. It will also be accessible from all your Matrix-compliant clients, whether they are web or mobile clients.

(edit: disclaimer: I'm also involved with matrix.org)

Hey. Thanks for the explanation. I ignore the 'will be accessible from all your clients' part - that should be the case for XMPP as well, or will be with MAM [1].

Storing the history on multiple servers? Not sure I understand the use case here (okay 'server goes down' I understand, but spreading my message history to multiple servers for that seems .. unexpected).

1: http://www.zash.se/mam.html

OK let me try to explain it better: let's say we have a conversation between 3 friends who are all running their own homeservers to connect to matrix. All three servers will keep a copy of the conversation, and if one server goes down and reconnects, the two other servers can update it with the messages that went on while it was down.

If friend 1 and 2 have a separate conversation in a different room, only their two servers will keep a copy of the conversation history. If friend 3 joins this room, his server will receive the current history from the other servers (there's a limit for efficiency but you can explicitly get all the history via pagination).

I have on my phone:

Standard text messaging

ConnectBot (to an irssi session for IRC)

The answer is just to say no when people ask you install $appoftheday to contact them. No hangouts, no skype, no whatsapp, no facebook polluting my phone with their intrusiveness and always-on-in-background tendencies. One person occasionally asks me to install Whatsapp, but each time I say no.

Hangouts is a pain to remove if it came in your ROM, but you can still freeze it with Titanium Backup.

Which is fine as long as you're happy to be "that guy". If I need to install RandomNewChatApp to talk to a client that's paying me $$$, I'm going to install it. Similarly, if a close friend or relative uses a new service, stubbornly saying "no, that's too awkward for me" is not the kind of person I want to be.

But I would prefer if I could just add them as an account to an app that I already have. And ideally an open-source, usable, attractive app.

I'm curious how many people in the real world actually use IRC. Find 10 people on the streets of New York and statistically zero use IRC and maybe, maybe 1 has even heard of it. Ask those same 10 people if they've heard of WhatsApp and likely 3 or 4 would have heard of it and probably 2 would have it on their device. If they're from outside the US, that number would go up to likely 7 would have it installed. Ask those same 10 people if they've ever heard of Skype and all 10 would say yes and likely 8 of them have used it.

Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.

Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.

Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.

Sure, SMS is always on, but it doesn't have access to my camera or mic. I have Skype on my desktops (although I haven't used it in over a year) where I can tell when it's running and where it doesn't bind itself to autostart whenever someone breathes. The main problem with apps is what they request access to and, barring modding your phone with XPrivacy (I've done it, but not an option for the average user), there's no way to deny those permissions.

As for IRC, it isn't how many people use it, but who uses it; namely a huge proportion of technical communities and people I want to communicate with.

As for Hangouts, it's in the default OEM ROMs, obviously, but also in the gapps packaged for CyanogenMod unless you remove it before flashing (as I did).

I'm mostly with you, but I actually quite like whatsapp.

Don't need to pay extra to send an image Messages don't get lost in transit and if it did, it'd let you know. It's fast, simple and usable.

I find most everything faddish, but occasionaly things win out because they suck less than what we already have. Of course, those specific problems above might be UK specific.

I know this will probably cause dissent, but I think the time of Google (now Apache) Wave may have arrived :-) XMPP based (but hideously complicated) and can still do more than any other "chat" system out there that I've seen.

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/

https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave

I immediately thought "oh, this looks like wave". The problem is that still don't think that this (or Apache Wave) is a whole quanta better than the good enough solutions that are out there.

I have:

* Telegram, with all my contacts (including several rather large group chats) * SMS, for telling new contacts to get Telegram

I don't mourn XMPP, it wasn't very nice and especially not very mobile friendly.

Not very mobile friendly .. in what way?

The limitations I know of are 'fixed' with decent/recent clients (Stream Management comes to mind). Care to elaborate?

Poor offline messaging support. As a consequence practically, poor battery life management.

Is that an inherent problem in XMPP, though? Something wrong with XEP-0013?

That's not exactly specific, unfortunately.

What's poor about it? I'm genuinely interested - not to convince you that you're wrong but to check if I missed a gotcha in my setup here. So far .. I don't see an issue. I could complain about missing features/XEPs that I'd love to have and cannot right now, but .. chatting should work just fine.

That said, you DO want Stream Management.

Well, that doesn't work either - since it requires other people to switch, or me to use yet another messaging app.

Besides, I don't trust the Telegram guys with their faux security claims.

Yeah, totally agree, but looks that users always like to see the wheel being reinvented. It's kind of depressing, why fix what's not broken ?

I don't think users really want the wheel to be reinvented. More like companies try to lock you in on their tech and make money with you. Fragmentation? CEO gives a shit.

Well, I rarely see users refuse to install an application even though it does the same thing as another one. That's part of the problem.

You're assuming things are not broken.

Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.

You can easily disable Hangouts: go to Settings - Apps - Hangouts and tap the button. It won't even show up in your launcher anymore.

Good tip. I tried this for several apps. Too bad it seems this doesn't work for the Play apps: Books, Films, Kiosk. But several apps are gone (Hangouts, search, Plus etc) and I hope they stay where they are.

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