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by frollogaston 252 days ago
XMPP was a well intended idea but a bad protocol. Sure federation is good, but they needed a proper standard instead of making everything an optional extension that C2S and S2S never agree on. Like getting the right auth and encryption is even messier than on email.

Also, XML was the wrong choice. Pissed me off as a dev, back when I was doing stuff with ejabberd.
3 comments
ezst 252 days ago
That's the kind of "compelling in theory, irrelevant in practice" comment I would make if I had no/obsolete experience with XMPP. It just works, with a healthy and thriving ecosystem of compatible client/server implementations developed independently by many organisations (small and large) around the world. At the user-level, it's just plug and play. As a developer, you don't even have to see any XML (you can deserialize your stanzas into whatever higher-level/prettier construct the programming language/stack your product depends on)
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Andrew_nenakhov 252 days ago
The argument that xmpp problems stem from XML format is the silliest of all: from 15 years of working with xmpp, we had all kinds of problems, but none of them were caused by XML format.
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frollogaston 252 days ago
XML isn't the root of any problems, it's just one extra annoyance
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Andrew_nenakhov 252 days ago
No, it isn't. Source: I work with it every day.
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jeremie 252 days ago
I picked XML for Jabber in 1998, and at that time I think it was the best choice :)
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ezst 250 days ago
Hi Jeremie, you made the world a better place, thanks for Jabber!
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Andrew_nenakhov 252 days ago
On the contrary, xmpp is a very good protocol. The problem with it is that most of extensions are bad: half-baked, often contradict or duplicate other extensions, and sometimes solve only part of the problem that they intend to solve.

Disclosure: my team and I are actively working on improving xmpp, but in a rather orthogonal direction to general XSF council route.

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ezst 250 days ago
> The problem with it is that most of extensions are bad: half-baked, often contradict or duplicate other extensions, and sometimes solve only part of the problem that they intend to solve.

I think that's in the organic nature of protocols catching-up to changing goals and priorities, as the state of the art and the user needs evolve. I think it's pretty-well acknowledged by the XSF (and to a further extent by modernxmpp.org) by curating a short-list of XEPs and behaviours to implement.

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