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Comment by throwawayaway | Hacker News Reader

setup a ejabberd server on a beaglebone and put a web xmpp client on it. encrypt the shit out of everything, get your friends on to it.

i'm sure there's valid business reasons to kill xmpp, not just total information awareness pressures from above.

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The problem right now is persistent connections on iOS. You need to use push messages instead, which requires a plugin on the jabber server and a matching client.

Not something you can expect all your friends to set up.

i thought push notifications worked with IM+ on iOS? i am not very familiar with either though, so i'm probably wrong.

There is a number of IM clients for iOS, that store your credential "in the cloud" (use their own infrastructure to terminate the XMPP connection and route push notifications to their clients). This is not ideal for your privacy, to put it into friendly words.

interesting! i think iMessage works like that. not sure that IM+ does, but it might well.

You could also have clients and servers implement http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html .

ejabberd doesn't support 0357 [0]. Presumably because their 'pro' version has mobile support.

MongooseIM doesn't support it either, although there is talk of it being implemented [1]

To be fair though, it was only accepted on the 18th March 2015.

[0] - https://www.ejabberd.im/protocols [1] - https://github.com/esl/MongooseIM/issues/405

Hehe, over a week of time and it's still not there!

FWIW, somebody is working on an ejabberd module [1], and there's some discussion [2] on the <standards@xmpp.org> mailing list.

(And ejabberd's community edition supports the XEPs that are relevant to mobile clients too, BTW.)

[1] - https://github.com/royneary/mod_push [2] - http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2015-March/thread...

i suggested this because i believe xmpp to be superior to irc.

Step #4 (get your friends to use it) is really hard to do. I tried and failed with my friend group. If there's one non-technical user in the group (or one who is tremendously attached to their Hangouts chat history), you're probably doomed to failure.

i've had limited success, one factor that helped was me going cold turkey on the alternatives. also you define your own success, gaining a monopoly is rather a high standard!

This.

If you won't drop the other networks there's no need for them to join your server, your still on the networks they're already using. Only you can change that.

I wrote a reply to another message that expressed this sentiment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267342

We apparently have quite different friends. Removing myself from Hangouts means that I get information either in person, or through email, if at all.

I'm currently relying on the Signal rework of TextSecure to get most of us off of Hangouts: the big barrier to adoption has been easy-to-configure clients that work on Android, iOS, and desktop and sync message history amongst clients.

web client xmpp isn't going to be very good at storing message history, i'll grant you.

Yep. You'd need a server somewhere to store and replay that message history. There is an XMPP standard that specifies how to do that. Question is whether or not your client can speak that protocol.

curiousity piqued, what's the XEP number for the protocol?

XEP-0313 I think: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

I was actually thinking about XEP-0136: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html . I was completely unaware of XEP-0313, thanks for the info!

XEP-136 is a good example why it's a bad idea to squeeze everything into a single specification (or XEP in this case): The reason it was not implemented by most XMPP stacks was, because it's so much you have to implement. XEP-313 focuses on what is important to achieve WhatsApp like persistent chats in XMPP. Functionality which is lacking in XEP-313 can be specified later on in a different XEP. After all that's why it is called the "Extensible Message and Presence Protocol (XMPP)".

I have the same experience with not being signed into chat networks, or not having Facebook / WhatsApp / Twitter etc. etc. accounts. People either don't tell me anything, or they email.

The craziest thing I get asked is "Do you have WhatsApp? I can send you pictures, and it's FREE!". Oddly the thought of sending an email with a picture attached (how easy is it on a phone these days??) doesn't pop into their mind as being "free" either!!! Insane! Email is far superior, as I can archive it unlike IM history.

> Email is far superior...

nod nod

I mention in another thread that if Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't take off, perhaps what we need is a super-sexy frontend on top of SMTP and IMAP.

> ...Do you have WhatsApp?...

The thing that really gets me going is the folks who will only send pictures with MMS.

I would like to believe the same. The prosody folks are awesome btw (as an alternative to ejabberd).

But there are still open issues. One big one, compared to all the FB/Google/etc. offerings is the ability to have a usable chat log. Current xmpp implementations/standards are more or less useless if you happen to use more than one device and want to look something up/want to see what you wrote to your brother yesterday, on your desktop, while looking at your phone.

Mandatory extensions in my world: - Stream Management (easy) - Carbon Copies (easy) - MAM/Message Archive (described above, hard, haven't found a way yet)

Mam is exactly what I am waiting for too.

It should be in prosody 0.10 [1] (not stable yet) but I did not yet have a change to test it.

(And XEP-0313 is still quite new and experimental)

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_mam

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