Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshcrowder | Hacker News Reader

This looks really interesting. I'd like to see it as a more open platform and not just for telegram.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why people have seemingly abandoned vanilla XMPP. It's a great, flexible, powerful, and yes standard and open, protocol.

Jaconda.im started as XMPP-based messenger hence the name – Jabber Conference derivative. And it does work with XMPP. Nothing changed in this regard.

However after Google Talk was replaced with proprietary Hangouts protocol we had to look for other options.

Telegram fits our concept just right. Let's see what other people think. You are welcome to participate.

Interesting... Google Talk dropping XMPP was a dark day, but alas that's the nature of basing a business off Google services.

It's also great to hear that it started out using XMPP, maybe Jaconda can bring XMPP back by allowing discovery based on GitHub accounts :o

We are using it ourselves as both XMPP and Telegram messenger. But the truth is, we are not planning to develop a stand-alone messenger. XMPP messengers are slowly sinking and Telegram looks like a nicer alternative. Especially considering Telegram's team showing interest in our project.

>"XMPP messengers are slowly sinking" I'm sure telegram is a good choice for your company, but "XMPP messengers are slowly sinking", I think, is a silly statement.

This is my personal opinion I've gathered from experience. I still have some friends using XMPP from Gtalk times. I have 0 new XMPP contacts for years since the fall of Gtalk. One might argue that it is still going strong, but I don't see anything proving that point. And the most authoritative indicator for ourselves is the amount of companies signed up for Jaconda. Guess having to add DNS records so XMPP is working on your domain is not helping either.

Are you aware that Google XMPP servers still support federation? (I tried just that the other week)

I don't see how you _had to_ look for other options

(still: I agree how looking at other options is the wise thing to do, given that Google+XMPP seems to be a -very- slowly sinking ship)

What do you gain there?

People that moved to Hangouts aren't available on GTalk (the xmpp part). I run my own XMPP server, people that have ancient Android 2.x mobiles and don't buy into the G+ nonsense can talk to me. People with more modern systems/that 'upgraded' to Hangout cannot.

Since my server cannot magically filter these people I came to the conclusion that Google _doesn't_ support xmpp, federation or not, for most of their users anymore.

(If you manage to access GTalk again, for example by running the GTalk thingy in GMail/the browser, you can talk to me again. I've got a hard time making my friends do that to contact me)

For all intents and purposes Google's XMPP support is broken.

> People that moved to Hangouts aren't available on GTalk (the xmpp part). I run my own XMPP server, people that have ancient Android 2.x mobiles and don't buy into the G+ nonsense can talk to me. People with more modern systems/that 'upgraded' to Hangout cannot.

True, but this is "only" a client problem. What is first and foremost important is the support server-side.

This ugly situation is just like if everyone suddenly decided en-masse to stop using their XMPP client of choice.

This is partly "waking up to reality" for the XMPP community, partly a huge tragedy for the lack of diversity in how people (used to) communicate over XMPP

...but none of these thing would impede Jaconda's users to receive notifications on their desktop or their mobile.

(If anything, I'd consider developers (Jaconda's users) more likely to have an actual XMPP client, rather than strictly relying only on what Google provides by default)

I .. wouldn't bet on Google's XMPP support.

They just (~now~) sent out messages to GTalk users, telling them that Gtalk-the-desktop-app support will be terminated on the 16th of February, like .. in a couple of days from now.

For me Google's xmpp support is nonexistent, I understand Jaconda's attitude.

Yeah, I feel less and less confident in relying on Google's XMPP. I was conviced that this would be the time.

But I waited until today (17th February) to reply, and... well, Google hasn't shutdown its XMPP servers yet, apparently

Go figure...

I assume it's because not every server (most notably: google's) support the XEP for offline messages, and having to always keep a connection to the remote server is mobile/battery-unfriendly.

All these newfangled alternatives usually rely on the Google services' push notifications api afaik.

XMPP is great for what it was designed for. It doesn't work well with mobile, high packet loss & high latency connections. XMPP is talkative and bandwidth intensive - bad for limited data/battery applications. It also wasn't designed for today's 1 person multiple devices reality. Most XMPP servers let you log in multiple times but messages don't sync between clients and sometimes get delivered to the client the user isnt currently in front of.

Also, sending files over XMPP has pretty much always sucked - there are a bunch of incompatible ways to do it and it's always been hit and miss depending on which client your chat partner was using, network topography, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com