I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP. I would love to hear someone who has been in the weeds on the development or even just following closely.
Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.
Depends if you mean just the technology or using it in the small federated spirit. Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients. Slack wasn't XMPP but supported it via a gateway until it was dropped.
Not sure how popular the small federation was back then, but I know Mac OS X Server touted an XMPP server and that was a first-class feature of iChat.
XMPP had rather bad name. Well-known design issues causing message losses, fractioned ecosystem due to varying implementation of extensions, unsuitability for mobile clients, absence of synchronization between clients, absence of end-to-end encryption. Most of these issues were (much) later fixed by extensions, but Matrix (or Signal for those who do not require federated one) was already there, offering E2EE by default.
Even today, E2EE in XMPP is rather inconvenient compared to Matrix due to absence of chain-of-trust in key management.
Sometimes I wonder if the endgame is each person having their own XMPP server for their set of devices. S2S is your E2EE then. Your chain of trust is your existing CA, unlike Matrix which starts from scratch. Cause XMPP wasn't designed from the start for clients not to trust servers, plus the fragmentation of C2S extensions was always a pain.
It's not a bad solution if someone can make it easy, even if it's a managed service that just lets tech-savvy users export it to self-hosting if they want.
First-class integration with two of the world's largest social networks put XMPP in practically everyone's hands for a time, but when all the major hosts left, network discoverability and typical account longevity dropped drastically. The landscape is bleak today.
And since then, our collective needs and expectations of a chat platform have expanded. XEPs have been developed to bolt much of that functionality onto the base protocol, but that has led to a fragmentation problem on top of the bleak server landscape.
This unfortunate situation might be navigable by a typical HN user, and perhaps we could guide a few friends and family members and promise to keep a server running for them, but I think the chances of most people succeeding with it are pretty slim today.
Facebook never had "first-class integration". It was just a client bridge - you could login into Facebook Chat using your XMPP client, but it was a completely separate network, unlike Google Talk which was an actual federating XMPP server.
singpolyma3|13 days ago
We didn't. It was never very popular, and is today more popular that it has ever been.
WD-42|13 days ago
I haven’t had a reason to use an xmpp client in over a decade.
zadikian|13 days ago
Not sure how popular the small federation was back then, but I know Mac OS X Server touted an XMPP server and that was a first-class feature of iChat.
zajio1am|13 days ago
Even today, E2EE in XMPP is rather inconvenient compared to Matrix due to absence of chain-of-trust in key management.
zadikian|12 days ago
It's not a bad solution if someone can make it easy, even if it's a managed service that just lets tech-savvy users export it to self-hosting if they want.
foresto|13 days ago
Facebook Messenger support for XMPP: 2010-2015
Jabber.org support for new accounts: 1999-2013
First-class integration with two of the world's largest social networks put XMPP in practically everyone's hands for a time, but when all the major hosts left, network discoverability and typical account longevity dropped drastically. The landscape is bleak today.
And since then, our collective needs and expectations of a chat platform have expanded. XEPs have been developed to bolt much of that functionality onto the base protocol, but that has led to a fragmentation problem on top of the bleak server landscape.
This unfortunate situation might be navigable by a typical HN user, and perhaps we could guide a few friends and family members and promise to keep a server running for them, but I think the chances of most people succeeding with it are pretty slim today.
seba_dos1|13 days ago
toastal|13 days ago
Flere-Imsaho|13 days ago
I.e. it worked too well.