While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.<p>Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?<p>We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.<p>So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there.<p>But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.
What a sad day.<p>A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps.<p>(Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)
I had a similar experience. I ran my own XMPP server for several years, so that my email address also worked as an XMPP/Jabber ID. I talked to people across several different services, including an increasing number of folks on Google Talk.<p>Then Google Talk stopped federating properly. Only a bit at first: things like presence notification didn't quite work right, and adding people didn't quite work right. And in the meantime, Hangouts popped up, and offered a more seamless audio/video experience too. Most people I know stopped using Google Talk entirely in favor of Hangouts; the few that remained used it only while the gmail web interface more-or-less supported it. Eventually, federation with Google Talk quite deliberately stopped working.<p>It didn't take long after that before almost everyone else I talked to on it stopped showing up, even those who didn't use Google Talk. People had "last seen" times in the months, and if I wanted to talk to those people in realtime, I sent them text messages, or Twitter DMs, or Hangout calls.<p>So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody to talk to.
Its our fault for letting our parents and cousins and friends start using imessage / hangouts / etc instead of XMPP. We are the ones to blame for its death, because the unwashed masses got locked in to regressive proprietary chat platforms over the past five years and we never pushed the issue.<p>But it doesn't help that XMPP was always awful. It has OpenGL syndrome - too many extensions, described too vaguely, and implemented in too many broken ways to work amongst one another. You get a swarm of mismatched servers and features, and if it did the same thing that would have saved commoner OpenGL adoption, it would probably still be king.<p>That problem is a blessed default implementation. If the foundations that wrote the specs for these low level pipeline APIs were also burdened to make sure the blessed implementation supported the entire standard perfectly, there would be an out of the box open source permissively licensed base for everyone else to build off, rather than the vague wording of technical documentation.<p>I'm just hoping Matrix becomes something. In the same way Vulkan can hopefully save universal graphics programming, Matrix might save IM, but we need to support it. I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo.
I feel that <a href="http://matrix.org/" rel="nofollow">http://matrix.org/</a>
Is the proper open source replacement for XMPP. I changed over to it from XMPP and haven't looked back.
Previous discussion about the death of XMPP:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936</a><p>My comment from that thread:<p>> I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card.<p>> But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.<p>> My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.<p>(It has since been turned off.)
My company's dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we're doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google Hangouts. Most of our clients prefer the phone, email or SMS/iMessage, but the ones that don't use Skype. If I'm chatting with friends it's probably on Facebook, unless it's on Hangouts. Any video chat my family does is over Facetime.<p>These services are never going to inter-operate, and I hate it. Imagine if we had to maintain different telephone numbers or different email accounts just to communicate with different groups of people. It's almost unimaginable, but that's what we have now with text and video chat.<p>This is core communications infrastructure. These segregated private networks have begun to displace the public telephone network in terms of popularity and importance. These are also the platforms over which video communication is being rolled out--not the public telephone network, as most people would have thought twenty-five years ago.<p>The FCC needs to step in and set some inter-operability rules for the major players here. I have mixed emotions suggesting this, considering that I'm generally opposed to regulation of the Internet. But unless the government steps in, can the situation ever change? Doesn't it need to?
As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on my domain, so a standalone service probably isn't going to make sense financially.<p>From a DIY perspective, what are the options? Are Ignite, Prosody, and ejabberd the only viable options? Are they all being maintained? Is there anything out there that works at a small scale; like a Node server that could run on OpenShift, or something else super lightweight?
In my opinion, and as a customer of Fastmail, I think this is the right call. xmpp as a <i>usable</i> federated chat protocol is pretty much dead.<p>For those who wish to keep using it, setting up your own server (prosody is pretty good!) isn't too hard these days.
We've turned chat interoperability into a business over at sameroom.io.<p>What other option is there, really? The other option is no interoperability.<p>A very relevant post: <a href="https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hangouts/" rel="nofollow">https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...</a>
This is disappointing, but I don't really blame them. Thankfully, IMAP is too established to succumb to embrace, extend, extinguish although Google seems to be trying. Chat protocols haven't been so lucky.<p>Hopefully federated chat will pick up, but it seems business models around social networking pretty much preclude any kind of federated communication between services. If adoption rates for Diaspora, Friendica, Pump.io, GNUSocial etc. are any indication, XMPP looks doomed. :(
Apple uses XMPP internally as a way to securely communicate.<p>Doesn't really change much; just thought that'd be an interesting thing to throw out.
Interestingly enough, more and more of my friends and family are registering with and using my XMPP server. Jitsi on the laptops and desktops and ChatSecure on the phones are generally the clients they're using.
Two insightful previous discussions about XMPP:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280155</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541</a><p>I'd highly recommend people read through them, especially if you're interested in <i>fixing</i> the issue.
Ah FFS. It's sad to see that XMPP has come to this. We had the promise of an open Internet and it's being consciously destroyed by the big players, one platform at a time.<p>(By which I mean Google, Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, etc.; all of those companies who have chosen to put a nail in the coffin of the open Internet).<p>Oh well, guess I won't be doing online chat any more.<p>I wonder whether the children even believed the last generation of Roman Britons when they spoke of writing, under floor heating, goods from half a world away...
Well I hate to see any features shut down even if the alternative means "unsupported operation"...<p>Opera has been doing that a -lot-, the biggest cases being Unite and soon Link.<p>One thing though:<p>>Meanwhile, our XMPP service is now somewhat behind the cutting edge, and lacks support for many of the recent XMPP extensions that the dedicated XMPP users are now beginning to request.<p>Does that mean if they kept silent the service would just run somewhere in the corner, forgotten? ^^
All I say want to say is we need open protocols (and standards), period. We need choice. Those who want to create wall-gardens are free to do so but we need open protocols and educate users and developers about how important they are. RSS, XMPP and others are used everyday, even by corporations so eager to user proprietary ones for their to keep their users prisoners.
To all of those moaning about how great XMPP was: It wasn't.<p>In a multi-device/mobile world XMPP is shit. HN constantly complains about Slack/Hipchat/etc "Reinventing the wheel". "We have IRC and XMPP" they cry without stopping for a second to understand that IRC/XMPP as not trivial to setup correctly, mobile support is complete shit, without things like bouncers or servers to hold all your messages you can lose things and stuff not be in sync, clients can't really add features unless all client can support it, and more.<p>Does it kind of suck that the dream of federated chat died/is dying? Yes but if it doesn't support what users really want then it's the standards fault. I don't blame any of the major players for pulling support, it wasn't going to move fast enough so they ditched it and built something that would.
Google really betrayed XMPP effort, and Eric Schmidt should be blamed for it. Others aren't any better - just greedy gardeners of their walled gardens.