<story><title>IETF should keep XMPP as IM standard, instead of Matrix</title><url>https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/Cj7n-7HwsN8xBzXCjD1pjD1j9Cg/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sascha_sl</author><text>Surprisingly short text for how long it sets up an analogy with little value.&lt;p&gt;The problem with XMPP has always been that it is too extensible with too few guarantees in interoperability. You&amp;#x27;ll know what this means if you ever set up OMEMO over 3 different client implementations. It also does too much, anything from Kafkaesque (pun intended) persistent pubsub to content labels. The quality of clients is simply not good enough, so most XEPs end up in specialized variants of clients or proprietary implementations (Facebook, GTalk, EA Origin) that lean more on ejabberd&amp;#x27;s scalability than other XMPP features like federation.&lt;p&gt;Also, XML is not a good serialization format, and some of the requirements in the protocol are pretty exotic and not trivial to implement in a lot of languages. Like setting up TLS on an existing connection (plus the absolute refusal of the XMPP WG to allow on-connect TLS). JSON over websocket or HTTP are just better at reaching a wide audience of developers.</text></comment>
<story><title>IETF should keep XMPP as IM standard, instead of Matrix</title><url>https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/Cj7n-7HwsN8xBzXCjD1pjD1j9Cg/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbrew</author><text>To me this is the lynchpin:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is the very situation where matrix devs should have made use of the 
properties of XMPP to improve it. Even the outstanding feature (I admit. 
its a fantastic idea) of matrix, decentralized conversation store, could 
have been implemented in XMPP as an XEP. Imagine the time and effort 
spent on improving XMPP, instead of reinventing wheels in matrix. We 
could have had a neat ubiquitous IM platform.&lt;p&gt;The approach XMPP took may have made sense when it was created, and it definitely had a lot of success early on at creating a truly federated IM network, but a lot of that evaporated when people and companies started needing more from the system than XMPP could guarantee.&lt;p&gt;XMPP + a bag of XEPs isn&amp;#x27;t a &amp;quot;neat ubuquitous IM platform&amp;quot; unless we get an XMPP2 that mandates certain key modern XEPs. It&amp;#x27;s just a big giant mess, the same one it&amp;#x27;s been for a long time.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s where Matrix should have started, I dunno. But they are where they are and the reality is that it&amp;#x27;s not up to the IETF to dictate how things &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; evolve. If Matrix supplants XMPP as a dominant open IM federation, and the people behind it want it to be standardized, all the &amp;quot;but XMPP did it first&amp;quot; in the world shouldn&amp;#x27;t prevent that.</text></comment>