I miss XMPP :(
XMPP is dead for reason, stop trying to bring it back
There is a mismatch between iMessage (Apple) and RCS (Google's flavour of the month). To the point where there is almost no sensible interoperability between the two.
All XMPP does is provide answers to "If I want to implement feature X, how should that look on the wire".
Just as the XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes the recommended baseline feature sets for XMPP clients, it wouldn't be hard for Apple and Google to follow that or (more likely) agree on their own baseline for interoperability between the two ecosystems.
As I always say when this comes up: the wire protocol is of least concern - it's not the reason these businesses don't prioritize interoperability. No protocol engineering can magically fix that.
Yeah, it’s dead. Maybe XMPP supports shiny stuff. But no client or server support them, and if they do it’s like they don’t understand the spec the same way.
A protocol should not be extensible, it should be full featured and regularly updated to include new needs. It should also propose a reference implementation and an official client so that there’s a clear baseline.
Matrix is doing it way better than XMPP ever did.
If you ever have multiple independent implementations a single monolithic spec will always only be partially supported (or there is only a single useable implementation like Synapse), so no different than having extensions.
Matrix is properly standardised at https://spec.matrix.org by a non-profit foundation: https://matrix.org/foundation. Just because the core team created a startup to fund our work (3 years into the project) doesn’t make it “a product by a single VC funded startup” - especially when there are hundreds of independent companies building on the standard. Meanwhile empirically synapse, dendrite and conduit can all talk fine to each other and we haven’t seen any fragmentation yet.
If you want to complain about something, go attack the closed cabal of RCS or the hypercapitalism silos of FAANG - and leave us the hell alone.
Instead I think constantly reinventing the same thing with slightly different, incompatible primitives is hurting the ecosystem a lot more.
Bridges also won't solve this. The matrix.org XMPP implementation (besides not being mentioned anywhere, not even in the Matrix FAQ about XMPP) is almost unusable and I suspect it will never allow for encrypted communications or A/V calls.
Putting a notification on "matrix" on HN so you can jump on every critic and yell "leave us the hell alone" is not kind.
I'd rather have 5 IM apps on my phone than have one and have no idea how my message shows up to the other person. I like that I can use the best app for the job. I mostly talk to people on telegram but if I want to do a voice chat or share my screen, I switch to discord. It's very frictionless and modern OSs allow you to receive notifications while the app is not actually running so it consumes no resources.