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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

This is so depressing. There's already a standard, interoperable, decentralized instant messaging protocol (http://xmpp.org/). And it does things none of the competing walled gardens do, like real private conversations (http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR). Why can't people just compete to produce the best user experience on top of XMPP?

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XMPP is literally worse than AIM (AIM is actually quite good these days, shame nobody uses it). Its groupchat support is simply awful, and if you log in from multiple devices (which was common enough years ago and is ubiquitous now that people have mobile phones) then messages will go to one at random and you will never have consistent chat history.

These shouldn't be hard problems given that just about every other chat system manages to get them right (though the hair-shirt of decentralization may make them harder), but they've been obvious problems with XMPP for about a decade now.

I wouldn't call decentralization a hair-shirt. I mean, I take your point; it makes certain things more difficult to implement. But it's a tradeoff, not a pointless sacrifice. There are huge advantages. The most obvious one to me is "keep your personal identifier when you change providers". Just like email.

I was going to say that Facebook Messenger does work with XMPP but double checking just now, it seems that was deprecated a year ago and will disappear at the end of next month. Huh.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat

Also, it never supported federation. Which is the email equivalent of gmail users only being able to email other gmail users.

it's a real shame - both facebook and google tried to use XMPP but have since removed support.

I think Google still work with XMPP but not 100%.

https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications

https://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for-goog...

In particular you mean XMPP with federation between servers. In general capitalism is a force against interoperability.

SMTP is an open standard. No one is making any money on email clients. The good ones have become such a commodity that they are open source. When people go looking for email hosting they get to choose between more or less identical services. SMTP is simply a terrible market. When everyone starts encrypting their emails then Gmail will cease to exist.

Innovation = invention * commercialization

Kudos for differentiating between those 3! ;)

I personally don't believe that invention and commercialization as suggested by this equitation (maybe not intentionally) are equally important, beneficial, meaningful.

I'd say: Innovation is the commercialization of an invention; it's just the corporate propaganda and internal incentive structure for people within which projects these process in such a way into the world as to make it believe something has been invented by a corporation for the benefit of the "audience". Which is very far away from the truth, i think.

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