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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Can't we just all converge on one message platform, like we also did with good old telephony?

May I suggest matrix.org... "Matrix is an open standard for decentralised communication...You can use Matrix for...Decentralised Group Chat (Fully distributed persistent chatrooms with no single points of control or failure)...WebRTC Signalling (Web-friendly signalling transport for interoperable VoIP and video calling)...Internet of Things (Exchanging and persisting data between devices and services)...and anywhere else you need a common data fabric to link together fragmented silos of communication."

For protocol info, see http://matrix.org

For seeing how it works, check out https://riot.im (only one of the numerous federated home servers, and only one of the chat clients). Or, better yet, host your own home (public or private) server across the matrix network! ;-)

Can't Google even converge on one message platform?

It's called XMPP but everyone hates it because it's based on XML and XML is not trendy.

HTML is based on XML, and most people seem to like it.

Both HTML and XML are children of SGML which is a child of GML.

HTML is the largest trouble of modern IT industry. All technical progress is revolving around circumventing HTML. First came things like Rails where you build HTML with pieces of strings separated by special syntax and your real code is shielded from it. Fortunately, now this is almost solved by React, which builds HTML for you automatically from JSON-like structure of lists and associative arrays ("application state").

HTML is based on SGML, not XML.

Last thing I heard you could annotate XML so the receiver would actually know what kind of data was supposed to be in a field. A no-go with JavaScript. You should _always_ have a big surprise when you parse data.

No it's because XMPP's multi device semantics are the opposite of what you want, and they never got offline messaging and file sharing to work reliably across clients.

XMPP was created for and by geeks who roam from workstation to workstation, not people who need to preserve history and state while using multiple devices at the same time under spotty connectivity.

It has extensions like "Message carbons" and "Message archive management".

Google Allo is launched in late 2016 and it is strictly bound to single device. This is marketed as feature, because only geeks and rocket engineers use workstations, normies do internets on cellphone (and only terrorists and drug dealers have more than one cellphone).

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