Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?

eimrine

I love XMPP, but its OTR plugin is kind of glitchy.

ruined

traction? the xmpp moment was 20 years ago. it's over now

jprjr_

Make a single cross-platform client that implements every non-humorous XEP. If you tell people "on Android you should use this app, on iOS use that app" - you lose regular people fast. If you have a feature that only exists in one app on one platform, you also really lose people. 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.

pkthunder

I think the article brushes over something that adds (IMO) a ton of friction to Jabber/XMPP: self-hosting your own server. About 6 months ago, I tried to go down the awesome selfhosted XMPP servers list and it was just so painful I ended up finding an alternative stack.

neilalexander

My attempts to use XMPP mostly start and end very quickly with the fact that there isn't a single good native XMPP client for Mac or iOS. None of Monal, Siskin or Beagle are a good experience, ChatSecure appears to be abandonware and Prose is Yet Another Web App.

theshrike79

There’s no official way to “tag” people on Jabber. Clients do it but the protocol doesn’t. This is (to me) a big issue when using bots, for example. I need a non-ambiguous trigger for them.

harvie

Jabber/XMPP started to suck at the moment we've started using smartphones that keep reconnecting between wifi and mobile networks as i move around. relying on that single persistent TCP connection does not make sense anymore. This is huge pain with IRC as well... And no, i will not run server-side proxy irc client that is supposed to keep me reachable while im reconnecting. Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently. While whatsapp just works...

mococa

I think the main problem was the fragmentation & extensions

est

I hope more people realize, protocol is not the problem, user experience is. The Telegram client leads in every aspect by far. It's just easy to use.

zajio1am

I use XMPP (with OMEMO) extensively and my main problem with it is absence of some basic key trust chains and bad handling of group chats 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.

armchairhacker

Is it worth it to overcome network effect? Maybe just make something so useful that it is even if only people who listen to you use it, which XMPP is, and recommend it to people who are willing to try (not only because of vague curiosity, which fades very quickly, but because it's useful to them).

foobiekr

Most of the critique in the post is about the low quality of Signal's app, which has zero to do with the protocol. And frankly almost every XMPP client was vastly worse in quality terms than Signal is and OTR regularly just produced garbage. It had a chance. Signal is not widespread because the only reason to use it is high privacy consciousness or being in the government and wanting secure chat with automatic deletion for conversations you're not supposed to be having. 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.

NietTim

Sounds like the same issue as with Mastodon. The vast majority of people are not interested in a 'protocol' (or even know what that is), they do not care what protocol powers their _app_, they just care about their app

larrysalibra

Jabber/XMPP is now over 25 years old. Its peak was back when Google Talk and Facebook Chat adopted it in the late 2000s and when Whatsapp launched using XMPP under the hood. And it largely died when those two large companies went fully proprietary around 2015. 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/

Aldipower

I remember when I connected my XMPP client, Pidgin I think, to the Facebook XMPP server and all my Facebook "friends" appeared in Pidgin as chat contacts. That were the times. Eventually Facebook turned this possibility off... Probably the Facebook chat is still XMPP internally even today.

mahboi

"Signal doesn’t actually suck. It’s fine. It gets the job done. It lets me communicate with my friends." The beginning was complaining about Signal! What is XMPP needed for then? Also, doesn't seem like many people have friends on either of them.

rickydroll

The fundamental question is: why should I use Jabber? What's the use case that makes it better than WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera? 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?

mahboi

I'd like Jabber to establish itself as the federated, non-E2EE chat platform. OMEMO is too little too late. You want E2EE so badly, you use Signal which has figured it out better than anyone else and is still glitchy. There's a reason Telegram is more popular; most people take stability and features over security. Some use cases like business chat actually can't have E2EE, and that'd probably be Jabber's foot in the door because no other open solution has taken off in business, and businesses don't need so much network effect. This was a main Jabber use case back in the day too. 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 someone really want to put extensions on a server, it's called XMPP and isn't compatible with Jabber; the X stands for excommunicated.

cadamsdotcom

> There are only two features people actually care about: reliable message delivery and the ability to reach their friends. Sorry to be a pain, and with full recognition that I don't probably represent the majority, but I care about emoji reactions, reply support, ability to send & receive images and video, ability to see that video later, a reasonable set of access control features for group chats; reply-privately for group chat messages, and a dozen other things. And I care about not making someone download an app I've never used that talks the protocol, because I can't support them getting started. So a single cross platform UX is needed too before you can hope for traction. Some of this is UX; some requires infra (eg. storing & forwarding media) But to produce a "complete" messaging tool is harder than it looks and the protocol layer, while important, should not be the focus of discussion. There needs to be a holistic conversation that includes UX, infrastructure capabilities, branding, and network effects.