Ask HN: What's the Deal with XMPP

XMPPinstant messagingopen protocolsdecentralized communication

No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.

Discussion (6 comments)

Showing 7 comments

vga42

about 2 months ago

3 replies

It's 'extensible.' That's what they say. 'Extensible.' You know what that means? It means they didn't finish it! It's like buying a car, and they say, 'Oh, the engine? That's... extensible. You figure it out!'

ekjhgkejhgk

about 2 months ago

That's such an uncharitable take... Many of these features that you would say make it unfinished didn't exist when XMPP first came out.

Being extensible has its downsides for sure, but calling it unfinished because it can be extended...

BrenBarn

about 2 months ago

I mean Matrix is also extensible.

ekjhgkejhgk

about 2 months ago

Ignorant take. WhatsApp uses XMPP. Zoom uses XMPP.

You see, I kept learning about XMPP and thinking "this is really good stuff, why isn't it more widely used?"

And so I realized: It IS very widely used precisely for being so good. Then the companies intentionally making it un-interoperable.

apothegm

about 2 months ago

1 reply

XMPP comes with the additional downside that most of the tooling around it is (or at least, a decade ago was) written in Erlang. Which is a niche purely functional language with a weird-ass syntax that is challenging to transition to from the C-syntax-derived procedural/OOP languages that make up the vast bulk of mainstream programming.

ezst

about 2 months ago

That's provably untrue. If you mainly write modules for the ejabberd server, indeed erlang might be on the menu, but that's very specific. If you develop on the client-side, pretty much all mainstream languages (JS, Python, C/C++ w&w/o Qt, Java, Go, rust, C#, …) have decent and independently well-maintained libraries to interact with XMPP. On the server-side, prosody (Lua) is as big (if not bigger) than ejabberd. And there are Openfire (JVM) and other implementations as well. Erlang is definitely not as unavoidable as you make it seem.

pndy

about 2 months ago

We had XMPP in facebook's messenger and google talk up until both companies decided that they embraced this open protocol enough and removed support /s

Pretty sure someone recently commented on XMPP and why it failed - mostly because of variety of servers and clients which differ among each other too much.

In Poland the second most popular instant messenger network during the "golden period" beside Gadu Gadu was Tlen.pl. It used a modified XMPP but it was never fully compatible with it - it was impossible to reach contacts from tlen.pl domain. Then facebook arrived and people moved from "domestic" networks to global ones.

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