Comment by JoshM33k
11 years ago
Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.
Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company.
I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.
Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, but we don't want to use a public server), where I can get commercial support, if there's a nice client (like irccloud is) for mobiles - there's a long list, unfortunately.
Also in-client searchable archives, media handling, history editing. All require going outside the IRC protocols.
IRC was designed by hackers, for hackers and it shows. Twenty years ago, IRC was my talk destination of choice and I operated a server within a major IRC network; these days my startup uses Slack which I determined to be the "least irritating" of the 21st century options.
I had high hopes for Google Wave but it was sadly stillborn.
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The closest you can get is a foss slack alternative such as Mattermost, and push for an IRC bridge (Mattermost is working on it it seems: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/issues/650).
But it's not possible to get what you're asking without breaking the IRC protocol - it's not easily extended and the formatting rules are icky mIRC crap.
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Slack's IRC bridge is actually pretty good. I know that's not quite what you're asking, but at least you personally could still interface using IRC.
Any reason you rejected IRCCloud? (disclosure: my company). We host private servers for teams and do the majority of what you're asking for.
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That sounds like a problem with the company. I can understand Slack and Hangouts (at least until Slack adds voice chat), but all that other stuff sounds like poor organization on the company's part.
What I posted in another thread still stands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256943. Things were better when everything was brought under one client. I know iMessage is almost impossible to reverse-engineer (due to Apple kicking non-iClients off) but I wish there was more effort going into reversing Hangouts. Someone's emulated the JS client from GMail but that's about as far as it's got
IRC's lack of scrollback alone kills it for these considerations, unfortunately. If there's an incident or discussion in progress and you only join the room partway through you have no way of catching up to speed.
That's what bouncers are for.
you wish everyone would use the worse option?
They were on their way out as some services were federating via XMPP. Then some stopped supporting it.
Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support.
All these problems are fixable but I don't see the tide ever actually changing direction and "hey suddenly XMPP is cool again, we should all use it".
One thing is for certain... humanity needs standard, open and widely-used protocols for communication. And there's a lot of ground to cover: Text, audio, video; single and multiuser; topical (IRC-like); social (invite-based/people I know); Synchronous (IM) and asynchronous (email/offline messaging)...
XMPP tried to do a lot of that. Maybe it tried to do too much. Maybe you just can't do all that in one protocol. I don't know, I just hope we'll get there soon - if nothing else, I'm tired of maintaining those "best way to reach me" charts JoshM33k is talking about.
>Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge
Not even remotely true! Prosody on Debian works out of the box, including federation. You just have to configure the domain name.
It's not hard to set up an XMPP server. It's hard to set up Ejabberd. Ejabberd is not the only XMPP server. Prosody is very easy to set up.
Honestly, people, think before you speak...
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Yap. Agreed. XMPP looked good on paper, if you read just the mission statement. Thinking back, I tried to dive into it once and nope-d out of it quickly. I guess I just blocked that experience out of my mind for some reason.
Who might be the right entity to take on creating a replacement for XMPP?
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I did some research on XMPP interop and its demise (ignore the title) - https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...
At some point it did fade a bit. About 2-3 years ago enough people were using XMPP/Gtalk so that I could reach about 80% of my acquaintances thought it.
Now, there's no single network that holds over 25% of them. Except facebook, but most of them don't actively use facebook every day, nor pay attention to it's IM.
Best ask them first via email.
I don't even know my girlfriend's email address. I'm 30, and she's only a few years younger. The world is strange now.
I miss Google Wave. Not the messy implementation, but the promise of a big influential company throwing its weight behind a modern, open communication protocol.
This. This was how I learned that the whole "don't be evil" thing was a load of bovine manure.
Google Wave, as an XMPP-based protocol, held enormous promise as a federated rich discussion standard. Sadly their first implementation was clunky and had a confused approach to standards and integration; it was effectively stillborn.
Then Google killed Google Talk by strongly favouring their closed "Hangouts" product which is practically inaccessible from chat clients. They went further, making it impossible to federate Google Talk to other XMPP services. Facebook and Microsoft followed suit, either ending XMPP support or closing their federation capability.
All three are therefore complicit in the worst abrogation of Internet interoperability since the early days of MSIE. And Google, in a land grab for consumer eyeballs, was the cheerleader.
Weird. I'm 30 too and I know all of my acquaintances' email addresses. How do you not know your girlfriend's email address? You can't even do something as simple as forwarding her your travel tickets so she knows your itinerary, or a receipt for concert tickets so she knows when it is, or send out a group email with details of the time and location of your party, etc.
Email was drifting off for me a handful of years back, but ever since smartphones ascended email has experienced a huge resurgence. I'm likely to use it in preference to SMS for (a) longer messages and (b) messages with multiple recipients (e.g. your standard activity planning emails).
It would be nice if the iOS and Android built-in Contacts apps had better support/integration for all the various messaging apps that work on their respective platforms. Rather than trying to remember who uses which services, their contact card could simply contain the entire roster of their services and usernames, and you could initiate a conversation in that service from within the contact card. I know you can do this with the baked in messaging services for each platform (SMS/MMS and iMessage for iOS, SMS/MMS and Hangouts for Android), but I'm talking about a one-stop-contacts-shop for every major messaging platform. Maybe that would require too much cooperation between messaging app authors and the big OS vendors, but I think it would be possible.
An alternative solution would be a cross platform third party Contacts app that offers that kind of integration. I've seen multi-messenger apps (Trillian, IM+) for both platforms, but that's not quite the same thing and it inevitably leaves out important functionality from the official apps.
That they don't on Android is due to the app, not the platform - if the client adds contact integration, it gets listed in the contact's card. Lync, of all things, is a good example of this. I'm pretty sure Skype does too.
I wasn't aware of that, thank you. I haven't used an Android phone in a while.
>more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers
utter nonsense.