XMPP being the chat of email didn't really pan out but it's by no means
dead - there are a lot of big vendors deploying XMPP (mostly closed
systems with federation turned off sadly) Chances are you used XMPP
without even knowing it.
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) exists and is actively publishing
new extensions. https://xmpp.org/extensions/
On 2022-09-08 11:53, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Wed, Sep 7, 2022 at 4:07 PM S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:sm%2Bietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hello,
At 10:06 AM 07-09-2022, Robert Sparks wrote:
>After a series of trials used to gather feedback from the community,
>the IETF has switched from Jabber to Zulip as its chat service.
I assumed that XMPP was in wide use in the IETF community and still
in use on the internet. I gather that is not the case given that RFC
6120 is following a path similar to RFC 959 [1]. It is high time to
consider what to do with "standards" which no longer have community
support.
A standard is something that has established a user community. For
whatever reason, Jabber has failed to do that and not for lack of trying.
I have only ever used Jabber at IETFs and on multiple occasions, I have
arrived at an IETF to discover that my Jabber application has simply
stopped working. I have had accounts at three separate identity
providers fail because the provider shut down.
Unfortunately, Adium is simply not fit for purpose. If you happen to
have chosen one of the identity providers that has shut down, you will
be left in a state where it won't work and will not tell you why. There
may be better options but after spending the first 45 minutes of
multiple IETFs trying to get a working jabber config,
Tools of the 'it works for me' variety are not fit for purpose even if
they do have a glossy GUI.
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.
What I want to build is something that meets this set of criteria:
Open Infrastructures — The Mathematical Mesh (mathmesh.com)
<https://www.mathmesh.com/open-infrastructures>
If people are interested in building an open infrastructure for
messaging that has PQC end to end security built in from the start, lets
talk in London.
I am putting together a prototype (Quark). I can't guarantee to have the
voice and video running by then but I think WebRTC has solved that part
for me already.
My basic premise here is that WebRTC has already done all of the hard
work to build what I need. All it lacks is the PKI and presence
components. And I have spent the last 30 years building a series of PKIs
and I now have a TKI.
