Improving UX helps somewhat but how do you convince users when most have unlimited texts with their plan and Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, Signal... to choose from?<p>I love the federation. I love the JID (so much better than a phone number). I love the handling of multiple clients connected to the same account. But it didn't take. Even my tech friends ditched it. IRC held strong against all of the above and even Slack to some extent but XMPP just faded away.<p>Signal has a gif search and SMS/MMS fallback. What does XMPP offer to normies?
This post comes at an interesting timing for us. Our product has a real time chat component, and currently is done over XMPP. We implemented using custom components on top of Tigase, a Java based XMPP server.<p>Due to a variety of reasons our chat services overall have fallen out of shape and we are in the process of considering a full re-write. Part of the consideration is ditching XMPP altogether. It seemed to me that for products where chat is only one of the features, XMPP feels like an awkward add-on, requiring its own set of IDs and auth protocols.<p>AFAIK many popular chat services these days are no longer based on XMPP, for one reason or another (e.g. scalability). Would like to hear any recommendations on what the best ways to do real time chat services nowadays.
Recently I spent an entire evening trying to get Gajim and ChatSecure work together with OMEMO and delivery of messages to multiple devices. I'm a technical person, but I failed, I got into all kinds of weird error modes, but ultimately no success. What a frustrating evening that was, a waste of time.<p>I have stopped to recommend Jabber/XMPP to people. Too many times I did that over the past 15 years and even when I succeeded in making them curious to try out... in the end there were too many problems and things didn't work right, and ultimately I too often looked like an idiot for recommending what is to other people just a broken tool. In the end, people don't care about "it's the choice that gives you freedom". People use the things that just <i>work</i>. And honestly, I can't even blame them (even if I'm personally not willing to give in to the privacy compromises that come with the other tools).
Another very important thing is some form of free hosting.<p>I used to have my own prosody server a long long time ago. Eventually, I got fed up, since very few people used XMPP. I just got rid of it and barely noticed any difference.<p>If I had some place where I could register my own user@domain that matches my own email, I'd use it for sure. But shelling out 5-10 USD a month for that isn't worth while, not for me, nor any other early adopter (especially when almost any other IM service is "free").
I am surprised this made it to the front page. XMPP is no longer relevant, please focus your efforts on a protocol that better meets your requirements. No matter what those requirements are, I would have hard time believing that XMPP is it.
Getting ejabberd set up to do encryption and file sharing was a huge pain in the butt. Worth it because I don't like SMS, but still freaking crazy hard to get running through a firewall.
XMPP: Captain Obvious edition<p>Add this article to the one above: <a href="https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html" rel="nofollow">https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html</a><p>It doesn't help that most of the features expected of a modern chat are "warning: experimental" XEPs and supported by at most one chat client and at most one XMPP server.<p>Bazaar indeed