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Comment by SamWhited | Hacker News Reader

Why would matrix adoption succeed where XMPP adoption failed?

They've done a few good things (Olm), and don't have to worry about backwards compatibility yet, but for the most part it seems like they're just reinventing the wheel and re-discovering problems XMPP fixed 15–20 years ago, except with a giant distributed graph protocol that doesn't scale very well (not that this matters for most people that aren't, eg. Google).

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Easy file sharing? Shared chat logs across devices? Easy encryption? Easy voice chats? Video chats? Group voice/video chats?

These are all things that I have on Matrix out-of-the-box and that I have some trouble getting on XMPP.

I run my own XMPP server, I have been doing it for a couple of years, but getting some modern features is very difficult, if not impossible. But with Matrix everything is quite easy.

I feel like clients and servers have fixed most of these. I've never had to do anything to have chat logs, all devices just have it thanks to MAM, file sharing is done with HTTP Upload, encryption is done with OMEMO (axolotl/Olm, although this one is still making its way into clients many support it already), voice and video is still a problem but lots of XMPP based services exist to make it easier (Jitsi Meet). It's only not a problem with Matrix yet because they have a single client; if they ever get as popular as XMPP and have many, they'll have the same fragmentation issues. What the XSF needs is one really good desktop client to compete; something with a feature set comparable to Convesations on Android, and good looks to boot.

>I've never had to do anything to have chat logs, all devices just have it thanks to MAM

Android has Conversations, which has pretty good XEP support. But I can count on one hand the number of desktop clients that support this, and none of them are Pidgin[0] or Adium, which are probably the two most popular desktop XMPP clients (though it's hard to know for sure). Gajim supports it but not for multi-user chats[1].

Chat history is certainly not a solved problem overall in XMPP.

>It's only not a problem with Matrix yet because they have a single client

Matrix has lots of clients, the difference is it has an official reference client that supports (almost) all the protocol's features.

[0] https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/15653 [1] https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/issues/8036

File sharing, cross-device logs and encryption have been addressed in the last one-two years, pushed forward by Conversations on Android. However, getting that into other clients (e.g. on desktop/web) requires dedicated developers, and this is where XMPP currently lacks a little bit - not for lack of motivation but for lack of time.

"Addressed" as in "most of the XEPs are marked as experimental and are subject to change".

That might look a bit weird on the outside, but this is how protocol design works in the XSF. First you make a proposal (which is marked as Experimental), then you implement it and wait for other people to implement it as well, and then you look how well it works and whether it has rough edges that need fixing. If it is considered good, it moves on to Draft and then to Final [0].

This process could be faster for sure, but that requires independent developers to work on implementations and to share their experience.

[0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0001.html#approval-std

Is there a set of mobile and desktop clients that support all these things you said were "addressed" properly? People always parade Conversations, but if I want phone-only I already have to many messengers.

Because if have to look through tables and bug trackers to figure out what client/server combination I can use (and have to pester my friends to use(!)) you can't count something as "addressed" IMHO. I still use only a very basic set of features with XMPP, because in my experience attempts to get anything advanced are way to time-intensive to be worth it for the few buddies still on XMPP, and I can't really push new people onto it that way.

> WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

Let me stress this:

> production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft

That's from XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload.

When incompatible changes are applied, the namespace used for feature negotiation is usually version-bumped, so implementations can choose to support and negotiate different versions of a given extension whenever that seems sensible.

Not sure this works as well elsewhere (e.g. the Matrix spec just states that it's "still evolving: the APIs are not yet frozen and this document is in places a work in progress or stale").

XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload

> WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

It means that there will be one client that supports this (Conversations for Android) and maybe one server supporting this (probably ejabberd). Good luck navigating the minefield :)

Meanwhile I can install Slack on multiple devices and have the same functionality everywhere :)

Conversations is substantially inferior to WhatsApp.

No encryption by default. No sent and read receipt by default. User account and password hazzle. No audio chat. No video chat.

XMPP just doesn't cut it.

None of these things have anything to do with XMPP (which supports all of them). I agree though, a more feature-rich client would be nice.

Yes, they do have to do with XMPP. Conversations had for some time encryption enabled by default, but they needed to disable it again.

I think XMPP is doomed, because it doesn't enforce the things I listed, and I think it will never do so.

I like Matrix, but don't you think Riot has a really convoluted UI?

I was hoping to be able to adopt it for communications within my family and friends, but it did confuse me a lot. Especially on Android.

Riot's UI could be way better (i work on it), but we're constantly iterating to try to nail the UX. We changed it a lot on Android last month though (https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-unveils-the-next-genera...) so might be worth trying if you haven't recently.

Looks nice. I didn't try this version. My last attempt was on F-Droid last month, just before the upgrade.

Matrix Riot is really good.

Does that have anything to do with Matrix though, or just that one company implemented a nice client? Conversations for Android/XMPP is also very good. There aren't any good desktop options, unfortunately, but I don't think this is necessarily an XMPP problem (although it is a problem that should be fixed), just that all the companies that write good desktop clients for XMPP make them proprietary or locked to their specific chat service.

https://github.com/dino/dino Shows a lot of promise. Would love a nice Windows client as well though.

With Mix coming, I think XMPP will become/remain pretty awesome. https://docs.ejabberd.im/tutorials/mix-010/

Thanks for the links; I wasn't aware ejabberd had an experimental MIX impementation! I switched to Prosody for my personal server a while back just because it was easier to setup/configure, but maybe it's time to look at ejabberd again (although I hate to run a full beam VM just for a single small server; as nice as beam is, it's still a lot of extra stuff to run on my tiny server).

I actually switched to Ejabberd from Prosody a few days ago! I hear you, but Ejabberd seems snappier now than from what I remember. Well worth a try, importing users from Prosody was a breeze.

There aren't any client's that can handle mix yet, but I think I saw something about it at Conversations GitHub.

Dino looks really cool, thanks for the link! Looks like it doesn't yet support MAM[0], but aside from that this may be the closest thing to a Conversations equivalent I've seen for the desktop.

https://github.com/dino/dino/tree/master/xmpp-vala/src/modul...

> or just that one company implemented a nice client?

That is a huge deal. Having a de-facto reference client for all platforms with most of the features is very important. XMPP never had that. Google could have done it but they didn't.

I used XMPP for more than a decade and tried everyone else to switch, but it has always been lacking in many ways in all platforms, without a safe fallback option.

> There aren't any good desktop options, unfortunately, but I don't think this is necessarily an XMPP problem (although it is a problem that should be fixed), just that all the companies that write good desktop clients for XMPP make them proprietary or locked to their specific chat service.

For the record, we have a working Desktop/Android client on the way, which supports file sharing, carbon, MAM, Jingle (for file transfer only so far, but voice/video is planed at some point), with unique interface, and more features to come. It is also working on web and console (TUI + CLI).

UI may need improvement, help is welcome.

https://www.goffi.org/blog/goffi/9ff9bb64-1e1f-4334-80e5-a86... and https://salut-a-toi.org/

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