Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

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So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work.

I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't work!

Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.

> ... persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statuses....

Across all my devices - Web, Linux, Android and FirefoxOS. No advertising.

Telegram - http://telegram.org

I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).

I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service, but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.

[0] https://jaconda.im [1] http://webcalldirect.com

Telegram looks really interesting. It has an open protocol and API so it should be easy to integrate with other systems; there is a libpurple port for it[1]. Maybe Telegram could be a replacement for XMPP?

[1] https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple

Wow, Telegram looks great! Now if I only could convince all of my friends to switch...

My biggest concern with things like this is that AFAICT their business model is kind of foggy. Quoting from their FAQ, "Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we'll invite our users to donate and add nonessential paid options to break even. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram." https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...

That's a very nice sentiment, but it's not a sentiment that fills me with confidence that I can rely on the continued existence of the free thing they're giving me.

You are so right. I really wanted XMPP to succeed and I used in happily back in 2002 or so. But it just doesn't seem to have evolved at all. You pretty much nailed it with persistent group chat and shared chat history. Skype can really get on my nerves, but it had this covered since forever, and trying to get people on XMPP without equivalent features is hopeless.

I used to use Skype for persistent, cross-platform group chat with my close group of friends. But we recently switched to using Slack, and it's far better.

The only thing that's missing, is end-to-end encryption.

Can you go into detail about what features were lacking?

For what it's worth, a lot comes down to what features the server admin has activated. I've heard many complaints about XMPP but this is the first I've heard someone mention lack of features as a problem with it.

Server-side chat logfiles that are distributed to all connecting clients? I've never looked into the protocol, but I'm pretty sure that one is lacking.

I haven't heard of an extension that does that either, but I'm not sure that would scale well for busy long-running Multi User Chats.

But the benefit of XMPP is that a new extension can be proposed that does this if enough people want such a feature. Personally I would argue that a better approach would be to make Public MUC logs accessible and searchable via a web interface and to have the client log chats going forward from when they join (with offline messaging from the server so you don't have to be online the whole time).

The problem with XMPP MUC's is that it's modelled after IRC, as that's what the protocol hackers know and love. But (please forgive the hyperbole) normal people don't use IRC, they use Skype. And the Skype model is so foreign to the IRC / XMPP techies that they'll always dismiss any attempts to add these features, often with spurious technical doubts as you just did. Ignoring that Skype has these features since a decade and has taken over (some parts of) the world because it has them. (Skype alone today has about ten times more daily active users than all IRC networks together!)

Not to forget whatsapp. 1000 times more daily active users than IRC. Basically the same model as Skype. (And likewise quite unlike IRC.)

There was certain controversy about which protocol to use for sharing history between clients for both private chats and MUC, but now XEP0313 seems to be the future of it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25982426/persistent-xmpp-...

There are implementations for servers, e.g https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_mam_muc, but I have yet to see a client reliably supporting this.

If you're talking about Multi-User Chats, then on entering a room the server should send previous messages (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html#enter-history), with no requirements set in stone (except when the client specifies a maximum amoun to send).

When a client logs in, it is true that a server doesn't have to send messages back, but that's the goal of XEP-0313.

In addition to logging as mentioned, I find that file transfers (encrypted!) that Just Work between users regardless of the network/client/server used seems to be missing.

I really like XMPP, and the extensibility it has is brilliant, but at the same time leads to a crazy level of fragmentation for the instant messaging use case. You're basically guaranteed that you can chat to others and maintain a buddy list, but anything much beyond that is a toss up, depending on the server used, how it's configured, and what client each user has.

1339782 add me

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