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A comment on Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal. Parent comment

Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by oblio on Sunday January 31, 2021 @05:33AM (#25977766)
Isn't XMPP a horribly designed protocol and not very good for mobile devices, though?

I'm not someone implementing XMPP but I remember reading articles about it back in the day and I recall hearing that the consensus that it's not a good protocol for mobile. Mobile being probably 95% of messaging traffic.

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Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by apichat on Sunday January 31, 2021 @05:44AM (#25977810)
The mobile problem for XMPP is solved since 2016 :

https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html

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Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by DyslexicAtheist on Sunday January 31, 2021 @06:21AM (#25977981)
that leaves the problem of p2p being an overlay network and as such not being a solved problem for network operators (especially in wireless networks). http://www.spice-center.org/files/publications/90-305-1-PB.p...
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Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by Jiejeing on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:00AM (#25978191)
Without the optimizations added since 2016, it is not a great protocol for mobile devices, but only because mobile devices are stupid and equate a background TCP connection with something bad and battery-heavy. That means they make it much more difficult (or impossible re: iOS) to do so.

That means apple & google are effectively dictating how you can use TCP (i.e. not outside of HTTP and friends), and everything is now terrible.

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Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by oblio on Sunday January 31, 2021 @08:09AM (#25978529)
> That means apple & google are effectively dictating how you can use TCP (i.e. not outside of HTTP and friends), and everything is now terrible.

Ok, but this is our reality. Windows has been the dominant desktop OS since 1995 or so (and MS-DOS was the one from 1985 until 1995 or so, from the same company).

Linux has been dominating the server space since about 2005 or so.

iOS and Android have dominated the mobile since about 2010.

I'm not holding my breath for any of these OSes disappearing from their niches before I die...

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Re:Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal by Jiejeing on Sunday January 31, 2021 @12:51PM (#25980784)
I am not holding my breath either, and as I said, there are plenty of protocol optimizations which have been made to fit into that terrible state of things. To the point that Conversations, my Android XMPP client, uses less battery than Signal, despite seeing a lot more activity.
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