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#xmpp#client#push#app#server#jabber#signal#chat#apps#platform
Discussion (91 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
People don't really sign up for protocols, they download apps. Like I often refer to the fediverse as "Mastodon" even though I know that's not entirely correct, because it's the fastest, easiest way to communicate what I'm talking about - microblogging. So you really need a single, good app you can just tell people to download.
[0] https://snikket.org/start/
There are still a LOT of things very much up in the air, such as message deletion, which work inconsistently from client to client, but message history is not it.
[0] https://compliance.conversations.im/
This is both true and also flies in the face of what XMPP (and the Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub-powered fediverse of microblogs-and-more) is supposed to be about. And it's also both true and yet people understand what "email" means without managing to run into major issues when banging out a reply to alice@gmail.example in response to a message that landed in the recipient's inbox @yahoo.com—nor worry too much about their SMSes being delivered by AT&T to their friend who uses Verizon (if they even know which provider their friend uses at all).
One thing that Jabber (and, later, Mastodon) did wrong was to take the unfortunate stance that it wouldn't be a big deal to adopt email-like identifiers without actually being/implying that Internet-standard email services are available because it was felt that users would just be smart enough to adapt to it. This was a mistake.
The confusion with email, though, can be leveraged and converted into something that the network has going for it, instead of a flaw.
If the author and the rest of the Jabber/XMPP community wants the public to "give Jabber/XMPP a shot", then it probably does need (a) a flagship instance (a la mastodon.social) that controls multiple domains (the way that many email providers like Runbox or Fastmail do) and requires the user to pick which one they want their handle to be associated with at signup, in order to introduce email-like decentralization to the userbase as early as possible, and that (b) raises the bar by setting a standard among Jabber/XMPP instances and actually offering email services to that userbase (prior art: Google married (XMPP-based) Gtalk with Gmail in the early days).
While undertaking all of this, an effort to update the XMPP protocol (a la JMAP, but in a backwards-compatible way) while simultaneously reconciling it with legacy email (also in a backwards-compatible way) wouldn't hurt—where "backwards-compatible" here means "to gracefully degrade and provide a fallback" (prior art: Delta Chat).
As for apps, people simply prefer instant messengers purposefully designed for their platform. There is genuinely a lot of platform-specific quirks around things like push notifications, which a non-iPhone developer not have the motivation to figure out. Besides that, a lot of these predate contemporary cross-platform technologies like Flutter.
Plus the reality of the fediverse is if you want to use multiple platforms, you wind up needing multiple accounts anyway. Like if I want to upload to Peertube, I need to make a Peertube account, so we're back to where we started of having multiple places to follow people since I can't use my Mastodon account to upload to Peertube. I'm able to have some cross-platform interaction, like commenting on videos from mastodon - but there's issues there like, Pixelfed only showing people posts with images.
When talking to most people I just call the whole thing Mastodon and treat it like its a single app/service, because that's what people are used to. If I start trying to tout how the fediverse is a decentralized platform of multiple applications and you can kinda/sorta interact across platforms - people's eyes glaze right over. They just do not care.
For apps - I've never met a person that picks a messenger because its tweaked for their platform. They just prefer whatever their friends are on. iMessage is something of a odd case since Apple just rolls you into it automatically and presents it via the default app.
They've been working on a version 3 for years but no idea if that will ever happen.
People don't use single browser and single email client, why IM should be different? It's a deficiency when you're forced to use a single "official client".
But most people seem to use Chrome on every device, no matter how much I wish they didn't.
Also last I checked - on iOS devices even if you use Chrome, you're really using Safari - I believe apple forces all web content to be rendered using the built-in WebKit.
Google has since spent the time making Chrome more locked down and user-hostile from a privacy perspective but the conventional wisdom for years was “just use Chrome” (for good reason) and that inertia continues :/
You sign up for Gmail, you get the Gmail app. You sign up for Outlook, you get the Outlook app. 1 service = 1 app.
For browser - on mobile most people use whatever the default browser on their device is. On desktop - Chrome. Pretty much everybody just downloads and uses Chrome.
It just needs feature versions - you support this one, means you support all of the features deemed important for users, no partial mishmash.
It’s mostly whining that the world is too unfair because capitalism and people are dumb for choosing Signal, etc.
Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently. While whatsapp just works...
Same for media, it just works, you should try it? And funny you mention WhatsApp, it's effectively a dialect of XMPP running on a fork of ejabberd.
>Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently.
Everyone use HTTP upload nowadays, it works all the time.
No it doesn't. Firstly, an out-of-band upload is ridiculous. Secondly, it doesn't support upload resumption in case the network is bad.
HTTP may not have native resumption, but it's not hard to do partial upload and resumption over HTTP, you just need agreement on parameters / a protocol to determine where to resume from.
It is a bit, true, but the alternatives are worse. XEP-0231 (Bits of Binary) Base64-encoded data inside the text message is more ridiculous idea. Direct P2P connections, which were widely used before HTTP upload, are mostly not working in our day.
>it doesn't support upload resumption in case the network is bad.
There's a draft for HTTP for it: https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-resuma...
On Android, I've never had any connection issues with either Signal or XMPP, so I would say that this problem is solved.
That is how you gain traction: by having people use it, realise the user experience is comparable or in some cases superior to that of other messaging systems - the party chat thing I mentioned above being a good example - and then realise they dont need to hand over their data to an ad broker (Google, Metafacebook, the fruit factory) or the government (all of them through some "chat control" type law).
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html
Many Android apps give the option of using either FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google's push service), UnifiedPush or polling.
If I understand correctly, Google and Apple have a way for clients to request push tokens, but in order to use the token, you have to authenticate as the app owner, so a client unaffiliated with the server can't simply send a push token to a server and have that be used ... Instead you'd need that push proxy server.
That proxy server comes with concerns about reliability and privacy and etc, but if you do pushes without cleartext content (and you should!), the footprint is minimal and you gotta do what you gotta do.
I don't follow xmpp/jabber, but I'd hope there's already an XEP for this. It's a pretty apparent need for the last I dunno 15 years and it has a clear solution.
With the right agitation, maybe you could get sharable platform push tokens and skip the intermediary app developer pusg server, but that seems unlikely.
You probably also want something in the push system to help trace push problems. For small chat servers and smallish client push proxy servers, I expect minimal operations staffing, but when messages are being delayed because of push problems, you want to be able to let affected clients know that they need to be more agressive with periodic/background connections until push works again. You may also want to let users or the administrators of the proxy push servers know as well. Pushes might be initiated late on the origin, delayed between the origin and the proxy, queued for a long time at the proxy, delayed between the proxy and platform push, or delayed within platform push (including on device delays from Doze, etc).
You've got to be able to detect that so you can make adjustments and reduce delay. Messaging delay reduces user satisfaction.
Yes, and it has been solved long time ago already and is now widely supported by both servers and clients.
> I don't follow xmpp/jabber, but I'd hope there's already an XEP for this.
See XEP-0198 from 2004 and XEP-0357 from 2015.
Taking a quick look, this one is marked deferred; I don't know what that means, but it sounds like it's not an accepted standard?. It requires the application push server to be an XMPP server (which I suspect is challenging for client developers, compared to having a https url that takes a POST or similar) and doesn't include a method for a client to request a test push to validate the setup or discuss feedback to the client for push failure.
This doesn't feel solved to me.
I didn't review XEP-0198 closely, based on perhipheral ecosystem interaction, I do think that one is solved.
Make decent official Jabber clients, called Jabber and not something else like a bird, and server that implements the right spec with default settings. Now is the time, you can AI slopcode entire native apps if you want to. If you really want to put extensions on your server, it's called XMPP and isn't compatible with Jabber, the X stands for excommunicated.
The Telegram client leads in every aspect by far. It's just easy to use.
I really like Telegram, it's the closest thing to what I wish IM should be, but still it's so far from it and to be honest its apps suck now trying to shove the "premium" features down your throat. I prefer using TelegramX (or Forkgram to still be able to see statuses)
Also, I would not advise to add proprietary repositories as you grant them root access to your system which is against security practices such as the principle of minimum privileges and defence-in-depth.
1) With OMEMO, each client/device of a user has its own key, but there is no trust relationship between them or some common master key. I can verify and trust counterparty key, but then counterparty adds another client/device and i have to do manual verification again.
2) Group chats do not have group key, but one encrypt messages for each group member (pairwise), which means that everybody has to do key exchange with everybody. This does not scale, especially with 1), which means that even if membership is stable, new keys may appear. Some clients (Conversations) do not allow to send message to a group when they do not know some keys of some group members/devices, which is fail situation that happen pretty often.
The fact that 25 years later it's still being described as two completely different names with a slash between them ("Jabber" SLASH "XMPP" ) makes me pretty confident it's not coming back.
Don't get me wrong...I'd love open, interoperable chat that everyone is reachable by as much as anyone, but it's important to recognize when one approach isn't working and why it isn't.
There's a lot of lessons to be learned from the death of jabber which I outlined in a post back on 2019: https://larrysalibra.com/the-death-of-jabber/
Probably the Facebook chat is still XMPP internally even today.
If reviving XMPP is the battle you want to fight, best of luck but I'd encourage you to take a step back, face reality, and spend your energy on something with a better chance of success. And I say that as someone who used Jabber all day long 20 years ago.
All we need is for a billion dollar company to build their own implementation and XMPP can be back once more. Exactly the way it gained popularity back in the day.
My most-used messaging app is SMS because if you have a cell phone, you have SMS. Example this morning is I made a connection with a handyman recommended by a friend. Text message, and it just worked.
So what's the compelling reason to move to Jabber? Why should my 92-year-old mother use it?
It's a little like asking "Carburetors: How do we gain traction?"
XMPP is not a well designed protocol in many ways. There's no particular reason for anyone to care.
This is (to me) a big issue when using bots, for example. I need a non-ambiguous trigger for them.
https://xmpp.org/software/?category=clients&xeps=0513
The beginning was complaining about Signal! What is XMPP needed for then? Also, framing it as the go-to that your friends are on is unusual; normally people lament that Signal is great but everyone they know is on something else.
I would rather want a feature, like Telegram has, where you can set auto-delete of all messages older than N days.
If message history is important it should be backed up on the receiver's end after decryption, like WhatsApp and signal do.
Businesses want to analyze internal company messages. Chat protocols / platforms need to make inroads with one of the core audiences for online chat. Those are largely taken right now, (slack/teams business, discord gaming/oss). If it is personal/small group messaging, several E2EE options already exist, though I understand Jabber/XMPP is trying to be in the chatroom genre
The way businesses handle this is by installing a certificate they manage and deploy to their proxies.