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0 pointslucideer8y ago0 comments

> standard of sorts in im space.

As mentioned, there's XMPP.

As well as Signal, there's also Matrix.org which is used by Riot.im.

You could argue there's now too many competing standards (ActivityPub has some similarities in a way too), but without having ever implemented an XMPP client myself, seemingly people had enough issues with it for there to be significant traction given to replacements like Matrix.

Personally I was always a fan of XMPP, and the idea/concept (just not the implementation) of Wave really excited me at the time. Momentum behind XMPP seems to have slowed so I've been giving Riot.im a trial. Sofar I really love it, so I'm once again hopeful.

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stephenr8y ago· 2 in thread

XMPP is still the protocol of choice for most IM/IM-like client-server services.

The major difference is that all the major players have turned off (or never enabled) federation, and dont advertise that its xmpp.

Honestly I think the non-xmpp open source projects will never succeed to the point of being ubiquitous. NIH strikes again.

Arathorn8y ago

Sadly openly federated XMPP is far from ubiquitous (relative to SMTP, or HTTP as federation success stories, or proprietary alternatives like WhatsApp and Slack).

Matrix is also far from ubiquitous too, but we categorically did not create it out of NIH syndrome. The whole point was to provide a protocol with entirely different primitives: history sync rather than message passing; group channels rather than 1:1; decentralisation rather than federation. And also a totally different governance model (no extensions; just a fat monolithic baseline that should “just work”). Obviously the experiment is still on and it remains to be seen if Matrix will succeed to the point of being ubiquitous, but to accuse it of being NIH is massively to miss the point.

stephenr8y ago

XMPP has multi user chat and history sync extensions.

It also has a several open implementations that have proven scalability.

I’m also not really sure what you mean about “decentralised rather than federated”. This is from the matrix.org faq:

> Matrix provides open federation - meaning that anyone on the internet can join into the Matrix ecosystem by deploying their own server.

No extensions means no customisation for the purpose at hand or for future enhancements.

So tell me again about how matrix is so different?

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