Re:XMPP, a comeback story
by lmm on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @10:42PM
(#29261756)
Nah, they were killed by XMPP's braindead protocol design that made it useless for multiple clients. Apparently the idea that people might want to read messages on both their phone and computer, or on two computers, was completely unimaginable for XMPP, despite every other messaging system doing the sensible thing. Eventually there was an XEP ("Message Carbons") to give the basic sensible functionality, and eventually eventually most servers more or less supported it and it more or less worked most of the time, but that killed XMPP on mobile long before push notification platforms were even a thing.
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That indeed was a problem that hurt it badly, but XMPP is also old. If I remember correctly, supporting multiple simultaneous clients at all was more than other contemporary IM systems did.
Re:XMPP, a comeback story
by AndyMcConachie on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:58AM
(#29264468)
This is certainly not a problem with XMPP now. I run my own XMPP server and use XMPP to share things between my different devices. I have multiple accounts logged in from multiple machines all day every day.
What I really like about XMPP is that I can do precisely this. Also, setting up and running prosody is dirt simple if you have any UNIX experience. IMO it's even simpler than running your own web server.
Exactly. XMPP's a little younger than AOL, but the idea of having more than one device connected to the Internet and using them simultaneously, was sheer opulence at one point. Combined with XMPP being an open protocol and difficulty incrementing protocol versions, lead to the shortcomings described.
From my memory at the time AIM and Skype would both Just Work. I think maybe MSN would forcibly log you out if you logged in on a second computer? (Still better than continuing to route messages to your other computer, which is what XMPP does by default).