[signal11]

Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features.

Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features).

I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.

==

* this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts

[luka-birsa]

There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative.

Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.

On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS.

I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough.

How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group....

Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.

[tiagoespinha]

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens.

To me it feels like the open standards never really kept up with the times, which in a way paved the way to walled gardens by the giants (and, in case of Slack, not so giants) to fill the gap which the open standards refused to fill.

I mean, sure IRC is awesome, text-only, channels, but emojis are limited to ASCII, inline GIFs are non-existent, and file-sharing (and/or storage) is rather clunky from what I remember from the old times.

And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling (or at least it didn't last time I checked) and it's not very surprising that companies just capitalize on that and make their own platforms.

Don't take me wrong though... it creeps me out how the company where I work trusts Slack with reams and reams of confidential documents, but I guess it's convenient to an extent which no other platform is.

[cornholio]

> And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling

The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler problem than email spam.

I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players (Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc.) at least at text chat level.

[nextos]

XMPP is a bit complex, and suffers from some problems derived from too much flexibility. The mandatory part of the protocol is too small. This could be fixed by creating a meta XEP that lists all XEPs needed by modern clients.

However, it's a very capable protocol. Just see how nice conversations.im is. It doesn't even use GCM, and both latency and energy usage are fantastic.

[ossguy]

Such a meta XEP exists already: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html#im

If you use a client that conforms to the Advanced Client requirements of the IM and Mobile Compliance Suites (with a similarly up-to-par server), you will have a very good experience.

[nextos]

The problem is that selection is still limited if you factor in OMEMO support (end-to-end encryption):

https://omemo.top/

[detaro]

Recommendations for good clients for desktop systems? Maybe my google-fu is particularly weak today, but I couldn't find a clear statements which clients outside conversations.im fullfill those (obviously only the IM suite, since mobile wouldn't apply)

[dmix]

> I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players

Sounds good on paper, sure, but ultimately it will end up being a predictable bureaucratic mess, causing more harm than good:

a) The mandatory 'open' standard that gets produced will end up being designed by committees of management teams from 6-7 major companies, each with their own list of feature requests and no central 'vision'.

b) A lack of a cohesive strategy and (critically) a lack of real incentives by the members to partake will result in endless delays, slow moving technological progress, layers of old cruft that never gets removed, and toxic political infighting causing confusion among vendors.

c) The standard ends up being so complex and involved that it isolates other small/medium sized players (or large foreign players) from joining in, eliminating the 'openness' the original regulation envisioned and crippling competition.

d) Ultimately reduces the ability for developers to get paid via monetization and grow via capital investments in the US, as non-regulated open-source projects (or foreign private apps) gain a major advantage of not having to be forced to use the standard. Cannibalizing the market the big players spent so much time/money building.

It's not just about good intentions and spotting a tough problem, it's about whether they can realistically and effectively achieve the end goals...

TLDR: open-source and the global nature of technology, lack of incentives, design by committee, regulatory agencies staffed by the very same companies it's regulating, etc, etc will result in the crippling of innovation and harm the quality of chat apps in the US.

[cornholio]

I don't expect US to move a finger on the issue - all major players are american. However, something like USB charging was imposed by the EU with great success, ending a massive source of e-waste and proprietary cruft manufacturers imposed onto consumers. For EU, the economic motivations to force american companies open to European competition would be very tempting and the consumer benefits significant.

The takeaway from the USB success is not to design a new protocol by committee, rather pick a mature open standard - for textual chats there are several mature ones.

[gwenzek]

You mean like what happened to the web ? I'm a bit tired that every time someone suggests a new regulation/standard on HN, someone feel smandated to explain why regulations are bad and why neo liberalism is awesome.

Could we assume that we all understand the downside of regulations ? but that we still suggest some when the market fall into a bad optimum (bad for the consumer). If you don't agree that the market is stuck in a bad place, fine you can argue that.

[TheKarateKid]

cornholio brings up a really good point. The fact that Whatsapp and other messaging apps have significant more European marketshare and growth rates than in other parts of the world could make an EU regulation's effect felt around the world, much like the USB one.

[ocdtrekkie]

And this is what happened back in the day. AOL was forced to add interoperability with competitors. But our government today is unwilling to step in front of corporations on behalf of the people.

[dbdr]

HN readers don't all have the same government. I assume you mean the US one. The EU has in some cases proved to be willing to confront corporations and/or to defend some consumers right. Not always or in the most efficient way, but here's hoping that it will continue and improve on that path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission

[ocdtrekkie]

I'm well aware, and really happy about the work the EU's competition commission is doing. Unfortunately, for US-based corporations, global change is unlikely to happen until the US steps in.

[fulafel]

What would be the advantage of adding tighter voice/video support to XMPP, vs just using links to sip: URIs? A major point of open standards is that you can use use them together with other open standards.

[hota_mazi]

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens

Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol.

It's all about product design and user interface.

[Dylan16807]

And the failing of the walled gardens is that you can't choose the product design and user interface you want and use it to talk to everyone.

[seba_dos1]

Slack provides IRC relay, which initially was almost feature complete, but got out of date with time.

Anyway, in some time Slack will probably fade away as quickly as it appeared, further contributing to the problem grandparent noticed and you seem to misunderstand.

[digi_owl]

And the more i read about Slack the less i want to touch it.

Emoji, gifs, fuck off.

[Freak_NL]

Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.

[balladeer]

I had signed up for Telegram on a phone, so can't say whether you can sign up w/o a phone (I think it would require SMS verification).

It doesn't need you to be logged in on any phone however. You can use just the desktop app. In fact I am on some really crowded and hyperactive Telegram groups so can't even imagine keeping it on my phone. Besides not a single one of my IRL friends use Telegram. I see 3-4 names, maybe they had signed up once.

[jhasse]

A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.

[notzorbo3]

> A smartphone isnt required

It is for Whatsapp. Not only for sign-up, but actually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. The web "session" times out constantly, so I'd have to re-pair it with my phone all the time. If I still decided to use whatsapp.

[BenjiWiebe]

To be really pedantic; a smartphone is not required for WhatsApp. You can activate a Google voice number with a landline, then use your Google voice number to activate WhatsApp running in BlueStacks or your emulator of choice.

Source: I did this for a few months. I'm not quite sure why...

[philtar]

A smartphone OS is required for whatsapp

[exikyut]

> [A]ctually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone.

How on earth does that work? Say my phone's on data, my laptop's on my home wifi with NAT. How does Whatsapp on the web reach my phone?

[tiagoespinha]

Your phone connects to WhatsApp's servers. So does your laptop. The bridging is likely done server-side. I assume this is done because WhatsApp is (probably) using end-to-end encryption, so everything must be ran by your phone (which is the only place where your private key is stored) in order to encrypt the messages.

[fauigerzigerk]

The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties.

Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.

[dmytroi]

Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country.

- [0] https://hitta.se

[fauigerzigerk]

Yes, what I meant to say is that the SIM card is tied to exactly one telco at any particular time. It's also tied to one device at a time.

Perhaps one of the virtual SIM card offerings would work with Signal though.

I'm juggling too many SIM cards and phones already. I don't want any new dependencies that complicate matters further.

[jhasse]

No, you can change the number associated with your Telegram account.

[fauigerzigerk]

I was talking about Signal. Sorry I didn't make that clear. The phone number is your identity. Changing it means reregistering with a different number.

[Edit] And I think it's essentially the same with WhatsApp, only they now make it a less manual process.

[ossguy]

In these cases you could use a https://jmp.chat/ phone number.

No smartphone is required for JMP, only an XMPP client (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 for some client options).

[jhasse]

A smartphone isn't required for Telegram either.

[TheKarateKid]

Incorrect. Whatsapp refuses to open on my iPad and isn't even available in the App Store. The only reason it got on there was a glitch in Apple's app sync which must've auto-downloaded it since I have it on my iPhone.

[jhasse]

Sorry, I was talking about Telegram. Should have made that more clear.

[Vinnl]

You do need one to set it up, right? I had to scan a QR code displayed on my desktop with my phone. (I could continue to use the desktop app while my phone was being repaired, though, which was great.)

[jhasse]

No, you can do the complete setup with the Telegram desktop app, but you need a device which can receive SMS or a phone call.

[Vinnl]

Oh hmm, looks like I got tangled in the threads - I thought we were discussing Signal. My bad!

[petre]

Wire doesn't. It uses the same protocol as Signal, has mobile, desktop and web apps and the source is on Github.

[tyfon]

I'm using Signal on my linux desktop right now. It appears to be a packaged webpage but it works fine and is linked to my phone and laptop.

All it require is a phone number, besides it's Snowden approved :)

[pmlnr]

You're using signal in a browser on your linux desktop. Poke me when there's any way to connect via bitlbee or libpurple, like there is for ICQ, jabber, etc.

[colordrops]

They lose all credibility when they force you to reveal your phone number. Doesn't matter who endorses it.

[LamaOfRuin]

They are entirely honest about their trade-offs. While those trade-offs may be deal-breakers for you, it should bolster their credibility.

[luka-birsa]

I'd just like to add that one of the key things I love about the current crypto craze is the fact that it gives us something that never existed before - the capability to monetize protocols. I know that most ICOs will fail, but through this process we might get something that solves this shitty situation with chat applications.

[whateveruser]

Perhaps try Skype lite? It has almost zero bloat, and has been working flawlessly for all my needs.

[jackson1way]

"Introducing Skype Lite Built for India - Chat and share with friends."

it appears to exist only for Android phones.

It's nothing but a joke that you'd have to switch to a "lite" version that is built explicitly for India [because of bad infrastructure] just to make it work in a country with much better infrastructure.

It's like buying a low-end car built for Indian market, because your regular car doesn't fit on the narrow roads in the US, the fuel consumption is too high, it leaks oil constantly and there is no service because nobody cares.

[throwaway2048]

This is a worthless analogy, because some software is paired down and is "built for india" it sucks?

A paired down debloated skype sounds like a godsend to me.

[Dylan16807]

...that's not what they were saying at all. The insults were being heaped on the 'normal' skype.

And skype lite is definitely lacking in configuration, like the ability to make emoticons less annoying.

(I've also switched to skype lite for the remaining two chats I'm in that use skype, now that the slightly-older android version stopped connecting and the newest interface is amazingly painful and laggy.)

[pmlnr]

It that like the Facebook Lite app that's geofenced to emerging countries? How bloated an app has to be to make a company with the size of M$ to create an alternative client?

[Y_Y]

I (relatively) happily use the Facebook Lite app in Ireland where I got it from Play Store. I'm not sure we're emerging from anything.

[tandav]

There're thousands of companies in Russia using Telegram as main communication tool.

[jrockway]

> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking.

That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation.

As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me. At Google we used Hangouts, and despite everyone complaining about it, it mostly worked well enough. You typed a message in it and at some high percentage probability, the other person got it. It was fine.

My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No.

For personal stuff, my group of friends uses Discord these days. It doesn't alleviate any complaints that you might have about other services, though. It is IRC-like and has voice/video chat. It has a native app, but it's whatever that framework is that calls bundling 1 kilobyte of HTML with three hundred gigabytes of a Chrome fork a "native app".

I also think you'd get better customer service from your local DMV than Discord:

https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/NswjT5nuyBW

[commandar]

>Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose name escapes me.

Mircrosoft's current stab at this is called Teams. I think it actually has potential: it's pretty much a clone of Slack, except that MS is willing to declare it compliant with, e.g., HIPAA.

[dorgo]

Teams is a nightmare. Buggy, slow UI (I suspect that they use their browser internally), annoying. They started to worsen Skype too, but it is stil heaven in comparison. I suspect that they make bad UX on purpose. No way to release such a bad IM client by accident.

[toyg]

Teams is a cross between Slack and Facebook. It has channels, but also a threaded-messages structure that is just painful. Everybody in the company I work for wants to like it, but they struggle. Slack would be so much better, but then we’d lose Sharepoint and AD integration and we’d have Yet Another Silo We Have To Pay For.

[darklajid]

I found it horrible, clients are Electron monsters (but still bo Linux version..) that they shove in your face whenever you try to use the web version.

So far I can stick with Lync/Skype for Business at my day job, which is bad too but.. slimmer, and does the job. Most of the time.

[option_greek]

I'm positive that they run the whole damn thing in a VM and electron together :). Its the very epitome of slow.

[eitland]

> My complaint has always been intrinsic to the medium, it lets people bug you Right Not for very low cost. "Hi, I see you're currently triple-booked with meetings, but I'm bored and I want you to chat with me and I'm much too lazy to think about my problem long enough to type a one-paragraph email and then wait for you to reply when you have free time." No.

Still easier to ignore on a chat than if it entered the inbox or if they call you in the middle of a meeting?

[amedvednikov]

I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers:

https://eul.im

It's only 90 KB (!)

Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.

[pmlnr]

Not native, not 90KB. The first thing it does is downloading an embedded web browser. 90KB the installer. Not native either. libpurple is native.

[amedvednikov]

v0.26 used to do that. Not v0.27. And yes, v0.27 is a 90KB native app. It will be released on Feb 14.

[tramtrist]

Pretty impressive. Any chance of tying it to IRSSI or making an IRC gateway like bitlbee? I connect to almost all those services through bitlbee already and it works pretty well. Add Naver Line support as well and I'm sold..

[amedvednikov]

IRC is supported, so you can use bitlbee with eul.

Line messenger is not supported, but eul is modular, and everyone will be able to add support of custom messengers in the future as long as they have an open API (which Line seems to have).

[dbdr]

Sounds impressive. Unfortunate timing that the new version is not out yet, but if it needs final touches then it does ;)

Did you consider open-sourcing it? More people would probably be willing to give it a try and support you on patreon if it was.

[gwenzek]

Sounds too good to be true! I'll check that.

[andersonfreitas]

Looks promising, keep working on it!

[peterisza]

Wow!

[rident]

Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint.

They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.

[pr3dr49]

You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information.

[1] https://about.mattermost.com/

[rident]

Matrix [1], mentioned elsewhere in these comments, looks interesting too and the Riot [2] app is similarly styled to Slack.

[1] https://matrix.org/

[2] https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org

[Spoom]

Matrix is basically open source Slack. It fixes a lot of the problems that IRC had, enabling continuous presence, central authentication, easy file transfer, bot integrations, and more. I really hope it catches on more.

Disclaimer: I help run a small Matrix network.

[Freak_NL]

Yeah, the GitLab omnibus package comes with MatterMost bundled. It's a really nice solution for self-hosted chat.

[Shoothe]

> They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.

As for the XMPP gateway it's just barely usable. From my personal experience it even tended to drop messages from time to time. It seems Slack added it just to claim XMPP compatibility. Just look at where is Slack placed in this ranking https://conversations.im/compliance/

[shliachtx]

Apparently they were built to mimic IRC but don't actually use it under the hood. But like you mentioned, they DO have some integration with IRC.

[_kwmj]

WhatsApp web (or the desktop) is really frustrating at times (though that's not completely WhatsApp's fault). Half the time I want to use it, it is not connected and I have to unlock my phone and open the app and wait for some time when the WhatsApp is connected again and the desktop app is connected too. Because WhatsApp web/desktop uses the phone app as its server.

[jackson1way]

I have the same issue with the web app (using an iPhone). What I figured out is, that you don't need to unlock the screen to make the web app reconnect. All you need to do is switch on the phone (without unlocking), so just give the home button a little tap and 2-3s later the web app is reconnected. Not a great solution, but well...

[balladeer]

You are right. That sometimes works. But what I've noticed, maybe it's some issue with my set up - not sure, that often the WhatsApp desktop/web app doesn't connect for 1-2 minutes even after I have unlocked (or woken) my phone - so I just click on WhatsApp app on phone anyway and let it reconnect. Android and iOS both are pretty strict on background tasks these days. I hope battery tech catches up with the speed at which apps' resource appetite is growing.

[eru]

Rest assured, Googlers mostly saw the same thing, and asked the same question "what are product managers thinking?".

[pja]

They were probably thinking "How many features do I need to claim responsibility for in order to get that next salary / stock option boost?"

By default feature creep tends to win out over less visible improvements: supporting the latter requires active effort from management.

[eru]

Oh, I was mostly thinking about bystanding Googlers not working on hangouts.

Your description is reasonable for people working on a project. (But even inside hangouts there was dissent. I don't know too much about the specifics, and probably wouldn't be allowed to tell, if I did..)

[jasikpark]

Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.

[donbindner]

Try to go back and delete old conversations.... Discord really falls down there.

[asherdavidson]

They have decent search at least. Lots of filters you can customize. It feels a little janky to use though.

[Semaphor]

> Skype for Business

Which has a horrible UX.

Personally, I use trillian to connect to facebook, jabber and others. But FB is always working hard to make that integration as bad as possible.

[unexistance]

the relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1810/