Tox.im

Lodewijk andré de la porte l at odewijk.nl
Wed Jul 9 03:17:31 PDT 2014


On Jul 9, 2014 7:44 AM, Łukasz \"Cyber Killer\" Korpalski <
cyberkiller8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's really nice that so many of you got into the spirit and start
> thinking about how to change xmpp to make it something new, but what are
> you achieving here?

We're being more fundamental and will achieve better and more modular
results because of it.

The protocol has a different aim than XMPP.

> another 10+ years until any meaningful applications start using it (if
> at all)... So yeah, except being "coder porn" it does nothing to help
> the problem here and now.

Concentrated pessimism? Why not both? Just make an XMPP bridge. Facebook
does that, Google might be doing that (or proprietary extensions), who
doesn't?

> I agree that xmpp is not perfect, it has some problems of its own, but
> it is an already established and widely used and standard protocol, with
> lots of implementations. From a practical point of view the best course
> of action to get something fast is to use it, and put whatever new stuff
> there is needed inside xmpp, keeping it compatible with the existing spec.

Why didn't XMPP do that? What do you mean widely used? IRC is widely used.
XMPP is not normally used with the user knowing it is XMPP. It's under the
hood technology.

> A technically pretty proto won't help, today’s world has a huge problem
> with taking anything new.

Which is because of a lack of "polymorphic protocols".

> fast machines (you can use compression on the fly, yes really :-P ),
loads of
> storage, broadband connections (even the 3G data caps are getting larger
> and larger each year), etc. People are sending gigabytes of binary files
> in base64 each day in email messages, so why even care? ;-)

Nobody ever said it will be efficient. But aside from that, there's scale
to worry about. You're also missing how people usually send data in binary
to hotmail or gmail, then they perform whatever voodoo they perform. So,
actually, most people send their e-mail attachments in binary.

The rest would probably really want to, but nobody is making the standard
any better. Why would they? They can do whatever they want without worrying
about compatibility because they own so much market share. A new standard
may have been used inside and between the mayor e-mail providers, would you
know?

> In my opinion the bottom line is - a small addition to existing xmpp has
> a far larger chance of being widely adopted (by applications and by the
> users) than a completely new protocol. And despite how awesome coder one
> might be - you won't be able to write all those implementations yourself
> or convince the masses to switch (again!).

There is no masses using XMPP. Masses of coders, maybe, and they will use
the best tool for the job.

All the extensions have succeeded in making any XMPP app lacking in
usability. I sure haven't found any nice XMPP clients, nice enough to
compare with native clients.

In fact I'm willing to bet everyone in the western world uses FB, Google
chat and MSN (slackers and slowpokes). They all have limited XMPP
implementations, they native clients do more. And there's no good app for
interacting with XMPP.

Pidgin really isn't good, it's just the only one out there. And it is still
in the MSN era. I've switched to Office 2013 from Libre/OpenOffice and it
really is in a different league all together. And it sucks that it is. But
what can we do?
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