On 8 Nov 2018 10:25 pm, "Ted Lemon" <mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 5:16 AM Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:Perhaps this is true, but that's not why XMPP failed. XMPP failed because it's really difficult to set up, even if you already have a client. And that in turn makes it hard to set up clients.What I meant here is that this reduces the demand for clients. Which is why we don't see more clients, and why the clients we see aren't particularly nice: there is simply no way to justify spending time making them nicer.
What you say makes a degree of sense if you believe that markets are driven purely by the needs of the end-user.
But the evidence is very much against that. Email is in a very similar - though not as dire - case. MUAs have not significantly advanced on the desktop, or indeed for open standards, in at least a decade.
The market, as I said before, is in a similar place - if you want an email address, you go to Google, or Hotmail/Outlook/whatever, or perhaps Yahoo, and have them set it up, and use whatever webmail client they give you. If you still want to use an IMAP account, they might let you, but it'll be a clunky experience made more so by bending the rules of the protocol to fit their model. Your client will probably have to have specific support to handle your provider.
Email's advantage is that its federation capability became rooted in user expectations early on, and while it's become ever more complicated - in part due to the efforts of the major providers - to make email federation work, it's essentially impossible for the same providers to remove support.
In the IM world, whilst every major provider has provided XMPP support or used XMPP directly in the past, open standard IM was never a consumer market success prior to proprietary IM services taking off, so they don't have to make any kind of effort here after an initial burst to gain some cheap market access.
On the other hand, I don't think that setting up an XMPP server is any harder than setting up an email server - and there are ways in which it is significantly simpler. The main point of difficulty seems to be in configuring SRV records and getting TLS right, but for trivial deployments where the XMPP domain is equal to the server hostname those problems vanish.
Finally, I dispute that XMPP has failed. The major providers have avoided federation, despite some early attempts by Google, due to the damage it would do to their business models based on lock-in. Federation has failed across the board, as non-federation and a lot of luck yields much better results - look at Github, which is based around a fully-decentralised version control system, yet has built a single silo'd platform.
But where federation is important, XMPP does very well indeed. Where rich messaging, permissionless extension, and all the rest are needed, it really does lead the field. There are several markets where it seems to dominate.
Dave.
