Hacker News Reader

Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

The real issue is federated IM vs non-federated IM. Anyone can make a IM system work off a single server. People do it all the time and we have had a series of incompatible IM systems in the past. Signal and Whatsapp are just the current flavours. Soon they will be gone and there will be new hotness. At this point I consider any non-federating IM system to be part of the problem.

As mentioned by someone in the linked thread, part of the user problem is that users can't even conceive of a federated IM system and don't know what one might be like. Asking someone to get a XMPP client so they can communicate with you normally just ends in confusion. There is no download button on the xmpp.com site.

* https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2017-January/031...

View on HN

I'd argue the future isn't just federation but bridging. We have already seen repeated attempts on the client side to abstract IM platform - Pidgin being the largest, but a ton of effort was invested into the Telepathy framework for about a decade.

The adoption rates show a general failure of the model.

Server-side transparent interoperability like Riot has with several services, however, seems extremely promising as a way to break that cycle.

How does it differ from XMPP server-to-server gateways?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...

Bridging is the problematic issue that gave birth to federation, so I'm pretty sure you're mistaken here.

I said isn't just, meaning you need both.

XMPP was a tower built too tall and wide and it crumbled under its own optiomal extension weight.

Just bridges mean you are still selling your soul to a primary operator, which prevents trust.

Federation and bridges without extension hell means you can use whatever homeserver you want, bridge to whatever you need to, and finally have working interoperable IM.

  > Asking someone to get a XMPP client so they can 
  > communicate with you normally just ends in confusion.

That's not entirely valid. I mean, look at bittorrent, they had an ^official^ client and then there were other clients and people who did not know anything about configuring their clients still managed to use them.

Asking someone to used an XMPP client, ideally should be the same as asking someone to use a torrent client.

> Asking someone to used an XMPP client, ideally should be the same as asking someone to use a torrent client

It is the same, and the majority of people can't manage to do either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com