Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat [LWN.net]

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 18:58 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat by pizza
Parent article: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

It was a little bit different. Libjingle actually worked fine with Google Talk's XMPP implementation, we used it in-house and actually ported its signaling layer to support SIP.

However, none of the major OpenSource projects were interested in adding Jingle - it simply sat there gathering dust for _years_ after Google spent literally millions to make it work. Do you remember the 3-line-text-field Pidgin fiasco? I've heard rumors that this was the trigger for Google to abandon XMPP internally.

And I can't really blame Google here.

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Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 23:21 UTC (Thu) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206) [Link] (7 responses)

> Do you remember the 3-line-text-field Pidgin fiasco?

No? I'd love to have a link. Is it related to this bug: https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986 ?

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 23:33 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Yep, exactly this one. Its Debian couterpart: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469283

In short, Pidgin developers limited the text input field to 4 lines (sorry, not 3). This change annoyed lots and lots of people, but developers refused to even make this feature optional.

There were a lot of discussions on various forums about it (Slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/04/30/1822237/pidgin-co... ).

I've heard from a source at Google that this very incident caused a reaction something like: "WTF are we spending millions to support XMPP if the best competing client is a toy managed by idiots?" Remember, this was 3 years after libjingle had been released.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 23:44 UTC (Thu) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206) [Link] (3 responses)

Huh, my initial thought following your previous comment about this being the straw to Google's XMPP efforts was that it was a silly anecdote to make a decision on... but it actually was a good illustration of the state of the XMPP client landscape.

On the other hand, Pidgin was never a good XMPP client, IMHO Psi was always much ahead, but Pidgin definitely benefited from more widespread use for being a multi-protocol client. Also Psi's stagnation and semi-fork in Psi+ didn't help it.

As a former XMPP advocate, I can only sigh.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 20, 2015 21:25 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

Pidgin is an ego-stroking exercise, Psi is growing cobwebs and its UI is straight out of the 90s, Jitsi is stereotypical enterprise software... I gave up on desktop clients and now do my IMing from Xabber.

Most of the features I want in an XMPP client are completely missing there (there's space reserved for your avatar, when you can't *set* it), but at least its complexity feels proportional to what it *does* provide. I can send/receive text and it handles Unicode properly. It's even actively developed these days, after considerable pressure from the users.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 23, 2015 5:29 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> after considerable pressure from the users.

They went through all the work to GPL it and then it seemed to just…die. I've seen updates go by in F-Droid, so I had guessed something picked back up. Good to hear, but I've since moved onto Conversations (which is also Android 5-ish in appearance).

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 23, 2015 16:54 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I've tested the Xabber 0.10 versions in F-Droid - the UI has finally caught up, but there's zero new functionality besides that and I also ran into tons of bugs using it. (And then Google's idea of OS package management helpfully destroyed a year of chat history when I tried to downgrade...)

I might switch to Conversations for the time being, or at least keep it around as a backup client.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 20, 2015 13:22 UTC (Fri) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link] (1 responses)

After reading your comment I went and looked at the issue in question just to see what was so terrible that it made Google give up on XMPP.

Boy, this is one very sad issue indeed. And not because the change by the pidgin team, they stated why and how they did it, and that many people saw a bug (tiny text entry area) and didn't know that you could just start typing without needing focus on the entry window.

Then the devs agreed to a larger max size for the window than 4, which is what happened in the next released version (so, at the next possible point in time). But in the meantime the bug report is spammed with plenty of people posting the same things again and again, even if they have been addressed already before (like said tiny field bug).

So let's be real here, this was maybe a mistake in communication, but not the reason XMPP never took on. XMPP, from it's inception, always had the problem that it was never as easy or even discoverable as other IM services, and in all the years I used it, only tech-related people ever were in my contact list, until they started to drop of, one after the other.

IM is one of those things where it doesn't matter if your solution is open and superior to one-vendor proprietary stuff if few of the people you want to message happen to have the client of your choice open. It's just that happened with mobile messaging, I have three clients, I actually like one, and I actually use WhatsApp.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 20, 2015 19:05 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> So let's be real here, this was maybe a mistake in communication, but not the reason XMPP never took on. XMPP, from it's inception, always had the problem that it was never as easy or even discoverable as other IM services, and in all the years I used it, only tech-related people ever were in my contact list, until they started to drop of, one after the other.

You hit the nail on the head -- XMPP is a protocol, not a service.

Providing a service costs money, and if you don't charge directly for it, you have to make up for it in other ways, eg selling ads via some sort of captive client.

XMPP's open nature directly conflicted with the economic model of providing an IM service, so there was never much incentive (from the service provider's perspective) to use XMPP.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 13, 2015 4:58 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I really did have high hopes for Jingle. This makes me sad.