Re:Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack
by slang800 on Thursday March 17, 2016 @03:43PM
(#11307010)
"One user sends an image and the other cannot display it" deals with features between two clients... I fail to see how this would be a more general issue with allowing different UIs. Especially since most chat clients do support the same features.
That argument is like saying we should only have one HTML browser because text-based browsers like w3m could exist.
And "one user sends an emoji, another client only displays a box, because he has no glyph in his font" is an issue between different operating systems. Even in a non-federated system like Slack I used to get emojis from people using iOS8 that don't display properly.
You want to pick and choose your UI? That is an anti-feature. One user sends an image and the other cannot display it because he uses a terminal client. One user sends an emoji, another client only displays a box, because he has no glyph in his font. This is already a problem with XMPP. It has lots of nice features, but each requires server and client to support it. There is no "Full XMPP" label.
And since you prominently talk about the protocol: XMPP probably has all the features one needs. Why hasn't it won yet? Because the complexity of all server-client combinations makes a good user experience too hard.
What is the problem with using different clients/networks for different groups? Why do you want to mix work and private groups into the same app? What does matter (especially for web apps) is a unified authentication scheme (Mozilla Persona would be my favorite), so I can quickly switch between them and do not need lots of accounts. Thus: Federated accounts, but diverse chat solutions.
(disclaimer: I slightly exaggerated to play devil's advocate)