Probably around 2011 I was trying to push for XMPP at a .edu for internal chat (they was no current system at all).

Around that time the iPad was showing up everywhere and I found was that there were zero good iOS XMPP clients. Every single one we tried, I'd notice it was proxying the credentials through a 3rd party server to deal with the lack of background connection support and to handle the push notifications. This was a major security issue, and also meant it would have been unusable during an internet outage.

This sort of thing, combined with the lack of server side history was probably what killed it.

Yeah, Android in 2011 could just run a connection in the background and actually work (assuming the client pings when idle / and adapts the ping interval to avoid stateful firewalls with low idle timeouts).

But iOS doesn't let you do background sockets, so you need push messages, and that's hard to coordinate between unrelated XMPP servers and clients. Of course, modern Android doesn't let you have background sockets either.

I have an android app that uses background connections; it works fine on modern Android. The connections are broken when people walk in and out of WLAN coverage, but as long as the app uses minimal CPU and network traffic Android doesn't intercede much.

Hmmm. Doesn't Android Doze randomly kill/pause your background execution?

Not so I've really noticed. The user starting apps that require very much memory probably does too, but that's also a minor effect.

If you don't use scheduled jobs to reopen your connections, WLAN/mobile switching is a pain and there are some smaller similar pains. If you solve that big pain and make sure to use very little battery power, the smaller pains go away.

facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned.

I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on facebook and I would read it on google!" I could see something die in their eyes when I explained that not only was there a solution to this, but also, facebook and google had both already decided to kill that solution.

Oh well... don't buy into walled gardens kids.

Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other.

At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail.

[1] This part is the joke.

> Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other.

Think of the value of this! Anyone, anywhere, using whatever client they choose, can send a basic message to anyone and expect it to arrive and be taken seriously.

Imagine if IM had worked the same way! I know XMPP is a shitstorm, but one can dream.

Not until I left academia and started working for MegaCorp that mandates outlook web as the only email client did I truly internalize the value of this.

IM can work the same way, by tacking it on top of email: https://delta.chat/en/

(Bonus: encryption is done automatically for you, by default)

Email is not a synchronous channel, and shouldn't be treated as such. Plenty of mailservers will happily delay your messages for a few minutes for spam and virus scanning (because who cares if an email arrives a minute later), and you have all sorts of asynchronous things built into the major servers and protocols (queues, delays/greylisting, 4-day(!!) backoff-retries, etc).

Most of the IM of today isn't synchronous as well. That's the exact reason OTR was deemed not enough, because it requires synchronization, and the Open Whisper guys came up with a novel encryption scheme that works with asynchronicity in mind.

Now of course that doesn't mean you should never be synchronous, and it is true email might not be the best vector here. But from my little experience it's good enough for simple messaging.

Even though it's widely recognized as impossible for individuals to self-host, at least there are many available providers, and any medium+ size organization can self-host. Things could be better but they could be worse too.

I host my family & friends email server for about a half dozen domains for the last 20 years using postfix with courier imap. Once every 5 years, Gmail doesn’t like something and starts sending my emails to spam but it resolves by itself in 2 weeks ;) Otherwise, the only maintenance is OS upgrades every 6 months or so.

By whom? The crowd on HN? Selfhosting email is obviously doable. Selfhosting does not imply residential IP.

It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit and with Google, Microsoft, &c it's impossible to get to anyone to resolve the issue once you know about it. Even for small companies this is a nightmare.

Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV.

And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either.

And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable.

As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered.

Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.

> Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV.

It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you can reliably communicate with 95% of people.

*Numbers made up to illustrate the point.

My use case is also to receive e-mails from non gmail/outlook users. In fact if I check my logs 1.5% of messages came from google's smtp service and 1 from outlook, out of last 15000 emails.

So if big provider drops 95% of incomming emails from non-big providers into black void, their service is less than useless to me, and their quality would be at par with small providers that can deliver 95% emails successfully.

Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.

XMPP was only the protocol. Google and others provided federation with it then took it away later. This decimated the social network size. When the vast majority connects to others primarily via Google Talk and its descendants or Facebook messenger, XMPP, as a protocol, didn’t stand a chance.

Bridges were shut down to push proprietary chat spinoffs of social media websites. Ex. Facebook had an XMPP bridge for a couple years but shut it down for this reason.

My tinfoil hat theory (that others may have had, or it may be something I read somewhere...) is that the XMPP protocol was part of what made PRISM successful, and the timing of these orgs adding XMPP is kind of aligned with when they were “online” for PRISM.

I’m pretty sure the larger orgs that were targeted could tell that the only way this information leaked easily, or was justified, was because of XMPP metadata, or some other large scale flaw.

The XMPP group also had a pretty visible security/encryption lockdown that I didn’t feel like was explained well, or maybe I just didn’t understand it :) https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...

Mobile push notifications and chat history sync

"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?"

Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient & the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.

"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it"

I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately.

I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past.

It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats.

Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.

> I'm not sure which Facebook you're using,

As I said, we're not using it anymore.

Ben Shapiro & BlueLives Matter were 6 of the 10 most reshared pieces of content yesterday & none of the other top 10 are anything but polarizing trashy antagonistic regressives either.

https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/128100072722610...

I would be willing to admit, this kind of content does not feature a lot in my personal experience when I did use Facebook. But in general, I'm not inclined to log in & stay logged in, as it doesn't add continuous value. And I don't want to give advertising-dollars to a platform that does, day after day after day, reliably, serve to brainwash America with these reactionary attention-hungry wolves.

I'd point out that the Salem witch trials you raise judged people based on fiction (there are no witches), & killed them. Losing some friends & your job for being a demonstratively terrible awful person does not seem like a fair comparison: there is real guilt, & the consequences seem survivable. I'm not sure that the ability of any one incident to become a lightning rod of attention is ideal, but it felt like being an absolutely terrible person for too long had no consequences: I would like to see more safety nets, more forgiveness, more healing, but there being consequences for actions is an enormous improvement over where we were, and frankly the consequences seem reasonably inline & reasonable in a vast majority of the situations at hand.

I'm sorry that this seems so overwhelming for you. I hope you can find some peace.

In May, The Daily Wire was the #7 most-interacted-with publisher on FB. https://www.newswhip.com/2020/06/top-publishers-facebook-may... They have more interactions per article than CNN and Huffington Post combined.

"We have reviewed the content you reported and found it doesn't go against our Community Standards."

This is the response I get 99% of times when I report blatant racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories.