Pidgin working on implementation of Facebook Messenger protocol
hg.pidgin.im
hg.pidgin.im
Plus, the dynamics around group chats are tricky. Messenger shows when people are typing and what point everybody has read up until. You can rename group messages, leave them, add people, mute/disable notifications, or mute for a period of time.
Without good compatibility or fallbacks for all of this behavior, Pidgin users are in for a bad time. Most will probably go back in frustration and pin messenger.com in a browser tab.
It would be nice if Pidgin would build in all the features you mentioned, but I'd be perfectly happy if it just connected to my chats and allowed me to send and receive text messages. Typing notifications would be nice-to-have, but this is all I ever use anyway. Not such a bad time for me.
That said- I'm sure pidgin can go a long way by implementing sane fallbacks for these features.
I know Pidgin is a pragmatic project, not a political one, but this doesn't sit well.
When will this happen? Officially it happened back in April [1], however I'm still logged in and can chat with people through XMPP.
It was the same with MSN, it was going to be turned off at some time but they kept it running a few months more. It's chance though: one day it may be just gone.
Given the profusion of services, and the resulting difficulty of managing a separate account on each if you want to maximize your connectivity, I'm surprised there isn't more interest in unified chat clients. Third party Pidgin plugins exist for some of those services, but I've never personally heard anyone mention actually using them, and availability is even more barren on mobile - my barometer might be off, but I feel like everyone has just forgotten about the possibility of interoperability. Then again, maybe it's just a question of the right person writing a new client designed for mobile and modern messaging, and that client taking off...
1. More complicated protocols. iMessage and Skype are many times more complicated than AIM/ICQ, MSN or YIM, with lots of layers of custom encryption and authentication. Reverse engineering of these protocols has never been close to done. 2. Battery usage. Each new account you add is (likely) another connection that you have to keep open. With one connection you can apply optimizations like the server bundling packets, but you can not do that when you need to keep connections to many different services.
Trust is also a difficult problem with transports, as they often need to store your passwords in plain. A single server storing your Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft passwords just does not sound like a great idea to me.
And the protocol flowchart for Lync is complicated as all hell, even with SIP at the core. (More complicated than SIP usually is.)
I wonder if Skype itself falls under MS's legal obligations to publish protocol descriptions.
What I find the most funny is that Facebook is seen as a champion of Open-Source, then when it comes to this kind of things they very much take the walled-garden approach just like any other major company around.
By who?
馃槑
Open protocols and federation are cool and all, but XMPP is not the protocol that will let someone be competitive in this space.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google. This is my opinion. I do not work on Hangouts.)
If Facebook valued compatibility with as many different products as possible, then they would keep XMPP support. The issue is not about features or XML. Most likely, it's about them wanting full control over the end-user experience: "We recommend people access Facebook Messages on the desktop via Facebook.com or Messenger.com."
Perhaps it is about providing the right hooks into the specification to not compromise the end user experience.
I think Docker is an interesting project to follow in this regard. They have shown the ability to get both startups and large players (amazon, google, microsoft) onboard by keeping the platform open. Yet they are clearly focused on providing the best experience for developer/ops interaction with cloud services. It will be interesting to see the rollout of their extension mechanisms and whether they can be a primary interface to cloud services or will become a second-teir compatibility layer. However, even in this case perhaps chat protocols could learn something here.
Because otherwise you end up with design-by-committee.
An interesting example is Google with SPDY. They wanted something new, built it, tested it, and then wrote the specifications (along with other actors of course). I think it is fair to say that without the SPDY experiment we wouldn't have seen HTTP/2 coming so fast. Google and the other actors had enough incentive (and actual time and money to spend) to make it go further. In the case of XMPP there's no such actor, unfortunately.
Its not broken. Standards are, ideally, distillations and applications of proven experience in a generally applicable way. You don't want standards trying to ride the bleeding edge, they want them to apply what is proven.
(OTOH, its good to have those working on the bleeding edge also opening for discussion how those experiments might be standardized while the experiments are still ongoing, and one vehicle for those discussions is draft standards or draft updates to existing standards.)
I'll be honest with you my friend. I would prefer to physically mail people coins then use facebook/google/apple pay. As much as I distrust banks, they at least have a record of letting me move to a competitor if I ask.
Then create an open protocol that supports what the users want
Photos: No problem with XMPP. Just inline them if you want.
Voice calls, video calls: Easily done with Jingle, which is a XMPP standard.
Stickers: See above, they are just a special form of smilies which like any client supports.
And so much more: http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-extensions/
I wonder if you know what Whatsapp is based on.
Could you cite at least 1 client that does all of the above on each platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS, WP, Android, iOS) ? (This is a genuine question, I'd like to know if it really is possible, especially on mobile)
It is no surprise that Whatsapp and the like are so successful. Textsecure/Signal is being too slow, I am afraid they missed their window of opportunity for fast widespread adoption.
Examples:
- unique message IDs? Absent. XEPs kind of provide; but I can't tell you which of the three or for relevant ones are the most relevant (AMP IDs from XEP 0079? Stream Management from XEP 0198? Acking from XEP 0184? Something from Carbons or MAM in 0313 or 0280? You know, if you wanted some light reading...).
- multi device? Oh. My. God. It's bananas. The spec behavior is that whenever a client sends a message, the server is supposed to consider that one the most alive, and then route all future messages exclusively to that one. So you send a message on your phone? Yeah, your desktop is just going to silently stop receiving messages.
- there's a concept of "message carbons" to deal with this. This involves re-sending all your messages back to the server after you receive them, with special instructions to send them back again to your other clients. The amount of redundantly redundant XML involved is eyewatering.
Combine that multidevice behavior (messages can get randomly routed anywhere at any time) with the wild-west nature of message delivery acks, and you can see how ridiculously difficult this makes the basic idea of "all clients should see the same picture".
Overall, the XEP process, conceptually, is a great example of open extensibility. The trouble is, so much of this stuff is core to sane message delivery semantics that it really, practically speaking, causes huge problems when it's all considered "extensions". Stuff like message IDs fundamentally shouldn't be an extension because it's just too critical that all minimum-viable clients agree. You just can't build higher level stuff without that. XEPs are great. A community process for extensions should exist. It just needs to exist for extensions, not subsume the total set of realistic minimum viable features.
I want an open chat protocol.
I thought XMPP might be the one. Then, as the parent comment jibes, I actually looked at it. Tried to write something with it.
XMPP is not prepared to be the one, in any sense at all except for legacy support. I have all the respect in the world for all the folks who put effort into trying to make an open chat standard, but... honestly, we need a stronger foundation than this.
What I'd like to see is a messaging system that gets the basics right, and that's deeply aware that it's AP out of CAP. Messages are inherently commutative (think CRDTs) and can be received in arbitrary order; people on two sides of a partition should have no trouble reconciling coherent logs regardless of if there was a two minute netsplit or someone was backpacking for two weeks. I'm looking for any existing stuff that suits this, and willing to collaborate on making it if it needs to be made!
It looks like they did tackle acausality head-on; I like what I see about previous message IDs being included in https://matrix.org/docs/spec/#pdus
Nervous about ever christening JSON "today's technology". JSON has the same problem XML in XMPP does: can't tunnel binary e.g. video without extreme backbending (jingle for XMPP is pretty much a textbook example of "too much friction -> not fit for purpose and near zero adoption"). But it looks like matrix is pluggable on transports, too, so that's potentially a sweet spot for lazy REST clients and powerful performance situations to coexist.
... And I popped into their self-hosted chat room. Observation 1: It works (!). Observation 2: the devs are dogfooding and seem both knowledgeable and friendly :) I haven't taken the leap to self-host yet (will later!); but from preliminaries, matrix is looking remarkably solid and well thought out. I'm going to try to build something with this! Thanks again for the link!
I use this to say "XML was the hot when XMPP was created, the way JSON is the hot today, when Matrix is created". I 100% agree with you that using a non-binary-friendly format sucks for pretty much anything that goes beyond plain text messaging:
- encryption
- files/emoticons/voice
- on the server side, any routing stuff
But still, like XMPP I hope this will not be enough to hamper its development.
> jingle for XMPP is pretty much a textbook example of "too much friction -> not fit for purpose and near zero adoption"
Amen to that. XMPP is basically an entity-to-entity messaging protocol, and yet because it can't handle binary there needs to be a negotiation step and yet another connection for binary stuff... blah.
The server-server API is currently just targetting https+json just for expedience in getting started, but nothing to stop us negotiating more efficient transports in future - capn proto has come up a lot in conversation as a possible option. Handling signing is a bit more fun as we currently rely on signing canonical json, but surmountable.
As for binary transfers... well, random blobs are just handled as pure HTTP with a mimetype currently :)
File transfers, nothing new here.
> "videos"
Either file transfer, or live voice+video. Neither are new. I last used XMPP+voice+video about five years ago.
> "stickers"
Image transfers. Or custom emoticons with a large size. Again, nothing new.
> "Western Union"
???
> "voice calls"
Again, nothing new about this.
Why not work on pushing an open standard instead of locking users into your proprietary client? I already know the answer (ads and user data collection; see also: G+), it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth #dontBeEvil
Why would you think they want that? It does not seem as if they do. I think it's much more likely facebook will try to stop this integration, than they will see it as a 'reward'.
I had started in 2001 a KDE multi-protocol messenger client called Kopete. I went inactive later but in 2009 I was using Facebook a lot so I "revived" my Kopete checkout to implement this custom protocol. I got the basics working: send messages and presence.
https://github.com/dmacvicar/kopete-facebook
Ironically, I stopped because they added XMPP support and Kopete already supported XMPP.
I now realize they deprecated XMPP it in early 2014, which is probably the reason Pidgin is now implementing the HTTP protocol I was looking at in 2009.
* At that time, most apps where available in their "desktop" versions. So if you used Gnome you tended to use Gnome versions of the app.
(it was a silly world back then)
* I was starting with development at that time, and the Gnome "SDK" was something I found not appealing at all. It could not even be called a platform, but a random collection of libraries. KDE on the other side was very consistent and appealing for developing GUI apps.
(And you may remember the KDE hate about non-standard-C++ and QObject, from the same guys that brought you Vala and GObject later)
* I had back then this opinion of not looking at my contact list by IM system, but by person with multiple transports.
That followed by KDE addressbook integration, etc. I would guess nowadays Pidgin also has this, but that was new back then. Kopete was a testbed for all this ideas.
* GAIM was not very stable back then
Now, I don't really use IM like I used to. Back then (middle and high school), mainly with AIM and MSN, I'd spend hours on IM each day. Now it's an occasional Google Talk or Facebook message and using HipChat with my work team. A different world I guess.
I actually recently installed Trinity DE (continuation of KDE 3.5) just for fun and old times sake. One of the first things I did was install Kopete. I tried logging into AIM, but found only one person I barely ever knew online, with hundreds offline.
Completely different world!. Instant Messaging is now done in big part from the smartphone, or from a webpage while visiting a social network or checking email.
https://hg.pidgin.im/soc/2015/jgeboski/facebook/rev/510e0ad7...
Maybe op misread the code?
I don't get how it's possible that it still works here. Only difference is that my workstation runs Linux and my laptop runs Windows.
Pretty big difference, no?