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tgaussman

The very first sentence irks me: "[…] for the only standardized chat protocol [XMPP]"

Haven't they heard about IRC (RFCs 1459, 2810–2813)?

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There's also http://matrix.org ; though it's not going down the RFC route (at the moment at least).

</blatant self-promotion>

There seems to be this general assumption at the moment that a) XMPP is the only open chat protocol about and b) its dead, so everyone decides that the only logical course of action is to write and use custom proprietary protocol. This, of course, massively sucks from a UX perspective where I end up having 100s of identities and apps and logins that I use (semi-)regularly to not just chat with people, but also comment on articles, discuss things on mailing lists etc.

(Long time lurker, only a reader till now) I've been looking for something like matrix for quite some time now (albeit probably in the wrong direction) and it seems like a really cool project. I've been wanting to build a chat application on top of a chat protocol like that for ages! Its a big boost to finally get started. Thanks!

Edit: whoops, I had commented once before, it was just so long ago that I forgot about it!

I noticed that too, plus the fact that the "Rooms" are preceded by # signs in the list. There's probably some IRC influence.

Slack uses that # convention as well (also probably inspired by IRC).

That and the use of hashtags to group things together on Twitter, etc.

I guess it's just a "thing" now.

Maybe this only matters to me, but my biggest gripe with IRC as a protocol is the lack of embedded newline ability. Take away newlines and now you've prevented atomic code snippets and killed newline sensitive markup suck as Markdown.

I deeply appreciate the history and communities available on IRC, but as a protocol, good riddance to it.

Use it with an Ejabberd server? It has IRC support as well.

https://www.ejabberd.im/mod_irc

OK, my bad: The oldest RFC is just "experimental" while the newer ones are "informational", and explicitly stating "It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind."

No wonder its not standardised, considering that almost any server out there uses a different, partly incompatible set of extensions (for server-to-server communication, at least), depending on which servers it was forked from (very few are not in some way derived from the original ircd[0]).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCd#/media/File:IRCd_software_...

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...

MSN Messenger's protocol was submitted to the ECMA in 1999, but MS made changes to their implementation almost immediately that were never documented.

Also, SIP/ SIMPLE.

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