As a community, we often ask ourselves how to attract more users to #XMPP. Yet the real tragedy is that people would rather build something entirely new (loosely based on email or #ActivityPub) than consider XMPP. Need end-to-end encryption by default? If compatibility with existing XMPP clients is a secondary concern, you can implement it in your own solution while still benefiting from our two decades of experience in instant messaging.
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@daniel One of the issues that I see with XMPP is that everything feels half broken. There's so many clients, they implement a non-overlapping set of features, and it gives the whole thing a broken or unpolished feel. I run Gajim on desktop and Conversations on mobile, and yet once a week or so I see something that makes me go "huh I wonder what happened there". It's a constant mental burden having to try and figure out what the clients are doing that would explain the observations.
@daniel we already have several problems to solve in activitypub, making it into a chat protocol isn't one of them. XMPP is our best bet for that.
@daniel I was just checking out the Wikipedia page, thanks for the pointer. … does it work well peer to peer? Identifies seem to be tied to a domain?
@daniel https://github.com/legastero/stanza looks cool. If I get time someday I might or might not make a silly XMPP server implementation in https://gleam.run/ for fun. Not sure anyone is fan of it. Probably @soph is xD
@daniel Also, I think missing Spaces/Subchats/Topics feature miss is a big reason most FOSS / Linux communities jumped from IRC (reliable, not featureful), Discord (featureful, not open source), and Telegram (great UX, closed source server) to Matrix
@daniel Someone have to solve https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ issues first
I consider this a failure on our part but I don’t really know what to do about it. Most arguments against #XMPP don’t hold if you’re building from scratch anyway:
• #Conversations_im looks very outdated: OK, but you are developing your own clients anyway.
• XMPP doesn’t have an SDK: Neither does your #ActivityPub or email stack
• OMEMO is insecure and I would prefer #MLS: Yes, let’s work on that together and you’ll still benefit from XMPP’s 100+ solved IM problems.
@daniel The big plus of #DeltaChat is that the infrastructure is already there. Infrastructure is a big part of the problem. And obviously using mail for that is only for people born before 2000.
Second is branding: When people hear #XMPP they hear 20 years of failure of implementing robust solutions both server-side and client-side. People just don't know that after 20 years there now are server and client solutions really working.