On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 8:31 PM S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Phillip,
At 08:53 AM 08-09-2022, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>There are many mistakes made in standards work but one of the most
>common is to keep flogging a dead horse. While there is certainly a
>possibility that XMPP will somehow manage to Travolta and sweep away
>the proprietary messaging systems we are stuck with, that is far
>from being a likely outcome.
>
>The IETF recognizing that Jabber has failed to succeed is a positive
>step in my view because it clears the way for an approach that has a
>better chance of success.
>
>
>My goal here is to establish an open infrastructure for messaging
>that has end-to-end security built in. If I thought Jabber was a
>viable vehicle for achieving that, I would have designed my system
>around Jabber. As things stand, there is no messaging solution that
>is designed as an open infrastructure. Signal has an open standard
>but it is not an open service, it is a walled garden.
I read some of your work on mesh. As an comment unrelated to mesh, I
would say that it would be very difficult to compete with the
established messaging services. I doubt that the users [1] would
migrate to a service based on open standards given that their
existing service works for them.
Just throwing another option on the table isn't going to be enough. This is not my first rodeo though.
The key control structure here is the contact book. The key pain points that are going to drive convergence towards a single open infrastructure are user dissatisfaction with having to juggle a dozen different messaging apps and the big hammer of government regulation.
The current situation is unsustainable. The problem with walled gardens is that they don't work at all or the work so well, they end up as monopolies. And if there is one big winner, that means there will be at least three big losers. And given the regulatory situation, this is really not a game anyone should ever hope to win. Not unless they think they can buy off the US Congress and the EU Commission at the same time.
The market as I see it today is twenty providers of which at least half know they have no chance of winning but they really want to make sure nobody else can either. So that half is already a constituency that should have a serious interest in an open infrastructure.
Adversarial interop is a real thing.
