Messaging apps have evolved in very pro-user ways over the years. Reactions, threads, voice/video/screenshare, and more are all popular with users. Stuff that we didn't have at all in the AIM era, or maybe only had on one chat platform.
And under the hood, I read that an important reason everyone left XMPP is it fundamentally requires an active connection, but that means your phone's radio can never enter low power mode, hurting battery life.
I miss Pidgin. I really liked having all my chats in one place. I sort of have that now with Beeper.
But it's also clear that we're not done evolving the medium, and standardized protocols, for all their upsides, often crystalize a platform in whatever state it's in when the standard is written.
This problem has been solved by https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html
Glad to see it's being addressed, but:
- The proposal is stable, but not finalized
- 13 years is a long time to wait for a solution (iPhone debuted in 2007, got apps in 2008)
- Plus however long it takes for implementations to adopt this
- Plus whether they adopt it at all, since this is a protocol extension and not a protocol requirement. The XEP requires client-server cooperation, which means the clients and all servers the user connects to have to implement this to see the benefit.
Is "stable" now a negative thing? I don't understand. If you are referring to the "document lifecycle" at the side of the XEP, and the "Final" status there... "Stable" is the "widespread adoption" stage. "Final" is a dead-end status that means the extension is frozen. It's rarely used for extensions that are actively in use until they are beyond updating.
> "13 years is a long time to wait for a solution (iPhone debuted in 2007, got apps in 2008)"
This extension was created in 2014, and implementations were already performing traffic optimizations (using other non-standard methods) before then (which is why we decided to standardize it).
> "Plus however long it takes for implementations to adopt this"
It's already adopted, implemented and deployed. You can see deployment stats at https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0352 - as for the handful of servers there that don't implement it, on investigation these tend to be private, abandoned or special-purpose servers.
> "Plus whether they adopt it at all, since this is a protocol extension and not a protocol requirement. The XEP requires client-server cooperation, which means the clients and all servers the user connects to have to implement this to see the benefit."
As I said, it's already implemented and adopted in clients and servers. It has been a requirement in the XMPP compliance suites for years (for reference, latest is here: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0459.html#mobile ).
All in all, your comment seems to contain a lot of unfounded scepticism and negativity. This problem is solved, since a long time :)
