[HN Gopher] Decentralize Messaging
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Decentralize Messaging
Author : wiggler00m
Score : 40 points
Date : 2020-01-31 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rodarmor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rodarmor.com)
| jacob019 wrote:
| I don't know why everyone hates XMPP. There are multiple solid
| open source server and client applications for just about every
| platform. It is decentralized and works well but without google,
| apple, and facebook making it practical for grandma to use, it
| doesn't catch on. Well the big players have no incentive to cede
| control to decentralization.
| dijit wrote:
| The issues mostly stem from:
|
| 1) not knowing what is supported on the server, or the other
| users server.
|
| 2) not handling mobile clients well (heavy battery use, weird
| deliverability issues.)
| pmlnr wrote:
| 1 can be queried.
|
| 2 is BS with capital letters. See Converations and it's
| forks.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 2 is not BS, but not for the given reasons (heavy battery
| use/weird deliverability issues). 'Not handling mobile
| clients well' is true.
|
| Did you ever wonder why there are no (to date) XMPP clients
| on iOS that are not complete and utter shit?
|
| As a person who has first-hand knowledge of the matter,
| managing a team member tasked with the development of an
| iOS XMPP app (which is supposed to be NOT complete and
| utter shit), I tell you that creation of such app is
| impossible without reinvention of half of XMPP stack
| (basically every part that touches client-server
| interaction). Thankfully, s2s works rather fine in XMPP.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Perhaps Apple deserves some of the blame here? Is the
| protocol just too chatty?
| arendtio wrote:
| How do Whatsapp et al. work differently on iOS than XMPP
| clients?
| jacob019 wrote:
| Servers most certainly do signal capabilities and extension
| support to clients, I do not have enough experience to
| comment on server-server signaling.
|
| With message archive management and message carbons there are
| no weird deliverability issues. I have not noticed battery
| issues with conversations running on several devices for the
| past couple years.
| ralls_ebfe wrote:
| I moved to xmpp only for instant messaging over a year ago. At
| first it was met with great resistance by my contacts, but by
| now my family and almost every relevant friend installed
| conversations on their smartphone. I helped with the setup and
| provide them with access to my personal server. The growing
| public knowledge about privacy violations of the big services
| has made it very easy for others to grasp the reasoning behind
| my preference for decentralized services.
|
| I actually thought about using matrix, but it apparently
| "modern" means "resource hungry". My xmpp instance server runs
| on a small server with 2GiB Ram, with more than 1.5GiB being
| unused.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Because then devs would need to follow rigorous standars with
| xml instead of "just building it".
|
| Yes, I'm full of anger. We had xmpp, pidgin, miranda, trillian.
| Now we have gazillion mobile only (no, a web gw through a
| server to your phone is NOT a desktop client) messaging, so
| let's throw matrix in to solve it, instead of building an xmpp
| client with up to date xep support. Xkcd 927 on steriods.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| As a person involved in XMPP development for over a decade, I
| can tell you why.
|
| To date, no one ever developed XMPP chat applications as a
| product, which can be easily deployed and will work
| consistently on every platform. Client and server developers
| were always disjointed, working separately from each other.
| This lead to great inconsistencies in implementations of even
| such basic functions like adding a contact. Also, it often
| happens that when a client developers need some feature that
| honestly should be done by a server, a developer still does
| this on a client, because it's all he has, with subpar results.
|
| Absent leadership from XSF also plays a role. This club now
| mostly cares about bureaucracy and following a set of self-
| imposed rules instead of developing a set of working standards
| that would allow XMPP apps to compete with the best messaging
| apps out there. That's why it is unlikely for any great product
| to appear under such guidance.
|
| We're trying a different approach, maybe we'll even succeed. If
| so, you'll hear about it on HN.
| arendtio wrote:
| How about Quicksy.im?
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli.
| ..
| [deleted]
| parvenu74 wrote:
| Isn't this, at least in part, the goal of OStatus/Mastodon? It's
| a great idea but I find it humorous and ironic that many mastodon
| admins circulate block lists specifically meant to cut off nodes.
| I would prefer that users just use the block features available
| (and adding the ability for a user to block nodes or apply
| blocklists if they want to, but not for admins to make that
| decision for them).
| zapf wrote:
| Does Matrix allow for anon communications?
| kitd wrote:
| Mentioned in a separate thread, but DeltaChat [1] offers a
| WhatsApp-style messaging interface over standard email.
|
| [1] - https://delta.chat/en/
| rapnie wrote:
| Like the idea. It was discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216827
| timw4mail wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's probably too late. Email caught on because it
| was the first option, and it's become ingrained in spite of
| itself.
|
| At this point the closest thing to a standard for person to
| person messaging is SMS... which like the old guard of ICQ, uses
| a number rather than a screen name.
|
| That said, I would love to see a good standard for person to
| person chat, especially one that doesn't rely on magic numbers.
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(page generated 2020-01-31 23:00 UTC)