Interesting.
I have a theory that most historic shifts are mainly due to some technological advancement or invention, and not mainly due to politics.
For example, Nazi Germany may have been the result of the invention or mass distribution of the radio as a method of influencing a nation. It is known that the Romans conquered Europe due to military strategy and superior iron weapons. The list goes on and on, however, history books tend to focus only on the sociological or political story.
I am generally in the same camp (technological changes have the greatest effect) but radio->Nazi Germany seems a bit too extreme reductionism.
On the other hand, you can partly derive the political system from technological changes too (I.e. without the socialist scare you don't get fascist regimes, and without the industrial revolution you don't get socialism)
I mean that was said in sarcasm, but there is a lot of discussion going on that the changing methods of communication can be having significant ramifications in all aspects of society.
People have made arguments stating that Trump is a manifestation of anti-social behaviors that are reliant on reinforcement through online echo-chambers which remove any form of social-moderation. The extent of which I agree with this arguments I'm not quite certain, but I do think from a sociology standpoint it's foolish not to investigate how the internet's changes to how we communicate have lead to changes in how we think, and potentially our collective political leanings.
Media theory is really fascinating when you dig in to it, and we should be mindful that we're still in the early days of the internet in the grand scheme of things, and society is still adjusting to what will forever be the new normal.
Do note that this idea of technological determinism[0] is referenced directly in the parent article.
As for me, I'd like to think that a bit more nuanced approach is better. Yes, stirrups might enable men to use horses in new ways and to brace themselves on horseback. But this sort of expensive heavily armoured cavalry cannot exists in a vacuum. It needs a class of wealthy people who can buy armour and horses. The wealthy need some sort of motivation to train themselves as warriors and so on. If you are interested in the subject, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 by Robert Bartlett [1] is an excellent book on the subject.
> It needs a class of wealthy people who can buy armour and horses.
A chicken/egg cycle, initialized by temporary imbalances that created a stable system: an increased advantage of cavalry over infantry drives up the price for "protection", which in turn feeds the horses. With less advantage of cavalry over infantry, the class system would have been much less pronounced.
In the spirit of "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords": a fluent socio-economic power structure was converted into an intransparent class system self-stabilized by the barrier of entry imposed by the inherent cost of heavy cavalry.
> I'd like to think that a bit more nuanced approach is better.
I agree. I think that a given technology has requirements and consequences that determine a lot about the society it is in, but it also presents various possibilities that will be determined by external factors, such as politics.
The theory of Kondratiev waves link closely to this idea, though the link between Nazi German and radios might be a somewhat too simplified model. There were quite few other historical antecedents that can be linked to rise of Nazi Germany.
There is (at least) one important missing: the Simplex Algorithm, or more generally algorithms for solving linear programs (LPs). These are used every day to optimize highly complex problems in real world economics.
Sorry, but this is another really bad comparison to Venice.
These cities have nowhere near the history of Venice as a medieval trade metropolis, nor are they actually built on islands in a lagoon. If you must compare a city with lots of canals to a European counterpart, at least take Amsterdam.
But the name of the Californian city really is Venice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice,_Los_Angeles), which I guess makes it kind of awkward to compare it to Amsterdam. Not sure if the article was a "comparison" at all, though, it read more like a history piece.
Whenever I read something like this I have a bad feeling about it. They are trying to get "C/C++" performance in Java by bypassing all the JVM's management and garbage collection. They even basically reimplemented malloc() for memory heap management. Why not just ditch Java itself?
Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list.
I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.
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.
Much of that can be had with a IRC bot. That doesn't include media handling, but you could do search via 1-on-1 /msg (query) with a bot. Then it'd truly be "in client" search.
Most would probably prefer a web ui, with search -- but recording chat could still be done via a bot.
I wouldn't say you could get most of the whole slack experience with just IRC, and you'd probably have to do some work (if only configuring channels/bots/find a web ui etc).
This doesn't resolve the multifarious issues with identity, reliability, scalability, federation, standardisation &c &c that further rule IRC out from being the universal panacea.
I stopped reading when the charter said "we are not working on the server protocol". The server protocol is the limiting factor in IRC's architecture.
My interest is in federated, reliable, ad-hoc messaging and IRC's acyclic forwarding graph and lack of any inherent identity model make that impossible.
It depends on the context. You can't federate with Google, Microsoft, Facebook anyway -- and you won't convert the world to use your favourite new protocol (most likely).
So that just leaves you with an easier problem: how can I host conversations etc for my team/org/my friends? And I think a single, isolated irc server should work fine for that use case, and work fine with many different irc clients?
So no, it's not a universial solution -- I just think it's strange when people bring up slack as somehow "better". Sure it's "better" in that it's a product with backing from some fine people -- but if you wanted a solution based on open standard, Free code that you could self-host without worrying about license costs etc ... then a battle-tested IRC server still seems like a half-decent option?
Or put it a different way: if you have 100s of users, could you get many of the features with IRC, and some bots? (Or maybe a slightly tweaked IRC server etc etc)?
[ed: Not that I claim there aren't problems with IRC -- and I've yet to run a personal ircd, so I don't know a) how much work it is to force TLS+SASL[1] and disable plain IRC, or b) if there are other solutions that might be better, that are available right now.
That is not an "easier problem" - that is repeating the problem: yet another venue/client/service we all have to be logged into to find one another.
Moreover, I'm really not interested in spending any time whatsoever on configuring and maintaining an IRC server and a fleet of bots, nor on teaching non-technical users in how to use the resulting heath-robinson system. Really, no. A world of no. I have run both a private IRC service and a public node of a very large network. It's a huge time sink. I've moved on.
As I see it, the only problem in this domain worth burning hours on is developing a protocol (and interoperable implementations thereof) that achieves everything the likes of Slack and Hipchat can do, only in a decentralized and federated manner.
> that is repeating the problem: yet another venue/client/service we all have to be logged into to find one another.
I'm not sure how you can create a new venue without creating a new venue? Perhaps have Google/Facebook/Microsoft/BigCorp create one for you, and the use that? But none of the big players appear to care a whit about facilitating a distributed, self-hosted, open Internet, so that is not going to happen?
> As I see it, the only problem in this domain worth burning hours on is developing a protocol (and interoperable implementations thereof) that achieves everything the likes of Slack and Hipchat can do, only in a decentralized and federated manner.
Any particular reason why you think IRC is inherently not a good building block for such a set of protocols/implementations? I'm not talking about IRC with legacy client support, I'm talking about a system that explicitly breaks comparability with legacy IRC, but still try to build on the years of experience and battle-testing IRC has.
You might be right that it's better to burn IRC to the ground, of course. My takeaway (as an observer, not a server operator in the trenches) is that one takeaway from XMPP/IRC is that:
1) We need authentication of users
2) We need authentication of servers
3) Today, we have no need of plain-text; encrypt and authenticate, or go home.
It appears that 1+3 leaves us with TLS-only, SASL auth if we go the IRC route. For 2) I suppose manual mediation of some kind (eg: server certs with Trust-on-first-Use, possibly a community blacklist?). I'm not sure if this would work, but on the surface it would appear to enable less spam and better security than email currently does.
And it should be much easier to strip down/adapt existing clients and servers than to build an entire new stack?
All that said, it might very well be that IRC server-server federation is hopelessly broken, and there's no hope.
Perhaps some kind of server-auth/community-web-of-trust framework on top of XMPP federation would make more sense?
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.
The trick with capabilities is you need them to be reasonably standard. Which means the go to IRCv3 server should ship with them turned on, and the reference client should be capable of using them.
I didn't make the decision. Slack started to appear and I didn't know that IRCCloud had apps (which seem to have great reviews). If I had known, I would have suggested it as an alternative. As it was, I just kept quiet as Slack seemed great - even better than HipChat, which I used to use for the same purpose.
Perhaps IRCCloud could be sold as a rebranded Enterprise app as an alternative to Slack? I'd love to see some competition as it looks like only HipChat and Slack are getting talked about.
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.
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.
I didn't just make this up on the spot, I've been dealing with these issues for years. So yes, I've thought about them a lot.
I used to run a prosody server on my home box. It is great software and a fantastic daemon compared to ejabberd (edit: Configuration-wise that is) but fat lot of good that does if you don't know what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers. I shut it down because it was pretty much useless and I wasn't able to talk to my gtalk buddies from it anymore.
> fat lot of good that does if you don't know what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers.
I have no idea what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers. I did not have to set up any such thing. Like I said, federation (server to server communication) works out of the box, at least on Debian.
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.
One of the best things that could happen today I think is Google open sourcing the Hangouts protocol. It's a reasonable alternative to XMPP and has a massive userbase. The clients are pretty horrible but that might be completely unrelated to how good the protocol is (Note: I have no idea how good it is. Because it's closed source.).
I was hopeful for a while but I don't really see it happening anymore :( Oh well...
Edit: Oh and the worst part: Communication is just one side of that coin. The other side is identity and it's one hell of a side. OpenID was a disaster. Mozilla got it mostly right with Persona but completely botched the marketing and has all but given up on it now. There is no decent foss protocol for identity/authentication today other than Persona, and nobody is working on one. There was a time indeed where I could've pictured Google working on solving this just for the hell of it. Just because it would improve the world. That Google is gone, and there's nobody with the appropriate reach that seems willing to do it now.
What notatoad said, plus I don't think they're maintaining things very well any more. Last time I tried to use the ecosystem, various non-core things were breaking. Huge pity, it's a very well-designed protocol.
Persona was great and it's a bit sad to see it dead after investing a lot of time in it but - one big architectural problem was there was no way to support delegation (the problem OAuth was originally designed to solve).
Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way.
> Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323?
I've worked with all three. The H.323 vs SIP battle was fought a long time ago... for better or worse, SIP won. Any H.323 systems still in the wild can probably be considered "legacy."
That being said, while H.323 has more "batteries included," its call flow is accordingly more complex. SIP is not too bad, there is some subtlety to it, but the main issue is that you have to piece together dozens of RFCs for an interoperable system, not to speak of implementation-specific quirks.
XMPP is the more appropriate protocol in this context -- IM and group chat -- because it has had presence and ad-hoc messaging baked in from the start, including reasonably supported MUC. Ultimately, XMPP's issues are similar to SIP's -- the patchwork of XEPs is too unwieldy to work with. For an example, compare the multimedia bits (eg, Jingle) and the corresponding SIP session setup flow. The stigma of being a XML-based protocol designed in the 90's doesn't help, either.
The biggest reason SIP is sticking around, however, is that it has major buy-in from the telcos with IMS/4G. However, SIP is also a more appropriate protocol for traditional telephony. In that respect, comparing SIP and XMPP is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. With the appropriate extensions, one could behave like the other, but it wouldn't be their strength.
If you know your requirements up front, then it's not hard. In fact, it's a good exercise to do so -- probably one reason why messaging systems are a dime a dozen nowadays. What's hard is making a messaging system that is everything for everybody. If SIP or XMPP has taught us anything, it's that "extensibility" is a killer. Requirements evolve, and often it is perceived as easier or "cleaner" to start from scratch, rather than work around the idiosyncrasies of existing systems.
On the other hand, if you are trying to design a protocol to solve a domain specific problem (eg, in cryptography, multimedia, distributed systems, etc) then it becomes more of a research endeavor with all the associated pitfalls. In that case, there will always be the "shoulders of giants" to build off of. Unfortunately though, for every pioneering TextSecure, there are a dozen CryptoCats repeating the same mistakes of years past...
Sigh, sorry to hear that. I was hoping h.323 might work well for a personal call system with the option of ditching regular cell service. And just try and brute force most communication through h.323 :-/
It seems obvious multimedia calls is part of our future, and I refuse to let that be dictated by corporate lock-in -- be that Skype/Lync, Hangouts or whatever Facebook will launch when they enable videochat. And any videochat/conference needs text messaging/conversations too, so it seems like it would be nice to run everything through one server/service.
Which I had hoped made sense would be a h.323 server (along with open source clients+maybe a websocket/web-client bridge).
Guess it'll have to be SIP for phone (so I can ditch my regular cell service), maybe SIP for videochat (but I'm sceptical about the videoconferencing bit)... and XMPP for messaging.
As neither Facebook, Google nor Microsoft support either XMPP in general (making it feasible to set up a bridge server) anymore, nor federation (which would actually be useful), I suppose I'll just have to give up on the idea that there'll appear a chat network where I'll be able to reach most of my contacts with a Free/Open client that isn't forced to play catchup to corporate whims.
For a while, Facebook via XMPP worked (but not group chat), now it's back to sms. Which is annoying because sms is gated by the telcos, although it should be easy enough to make a xmpp<>sms gateway (eg: [s]) with a spare android phone. For personal use that wouldn't have to incur any sms fees (but would mean keeping a non-free cellular plan).
[ed: Forgot to commend duckduckgo and fastmail on hosting proper XMPP with federation and registration (at least ddg[d]) enabled. That's one reason why XMPP is nice -- you can actually point non-technical users at a suitable client, and add a couple of screenshots how how to set it up with ddg -- and they can then federate/talk away (that is assuming you don't/can't/won't support registration on your own server -- in my case the main reason not to recommend people wanting to talk to me to register on my server, is that I wouldn't know what kind of "SLA" my own server would have -- so if they used XMPP for other things than talking to me, having an account with someone a little more dedicated to keeping a server open to the general public might be better. But the main point is that that just works with XMPP today. And it should've just worked with both Facebook chat and Google talk/hangouts/newnamehere. And it probably also should've worked with Microsoft accounts/skype/hotmail.
> I was hoping h.323 might work well for a personal call system with the option of ditching regular cell service. And just try and brute force most communication through h.323
I guess you could try to run H.323 through a $protocol bridge, but I don't know why you would want to. Retrofitting modern features onto H.323 does not seem like fun. Because if SIP suffers from being too general, H.323 suffers from being way too specific in its architecture and technology requirements -- read through some of the associated specs, eg H.245, and it's not hard to see why SIP won. For the longest time, there was not even the notion of URI addressing...
> SIP for phone ... maybe SIP for videochat (but I'm sceptical
In SIP (and most well-designed protocols), there is no fundamental difference between an audio and a video call. It's just capability negotiation and RTP. Actual interoperability is the problem... and that is one of the reasons vendors like to create closed networks, so they can guarantee the experience end-to-end.
Regarding gating and lock-in: Part of it may be a desire for a proprietary walled garden [1], but a big reason is logistical as well -- one of the reasons Google disabled XMPP federation was because of abuse. This is the same reason you can't dial directly into the PSTN without going through a trusted trunk, and why unlicensed use of cellular frequencies (or any RF, really) is illegal.
[1] Actually, the reason the PSTN is federated is probably more an accident of history than anything else. If not for the AT&T monopoly (and subsequent breakup), people would have been complaining about siloed telephone services 50 years ago! See Tim Wu's The Master Switch for a nice treatment of this.
Right. Interesting that XMPP in many ways reimplemented some of the problems of both IRC and USENET wrt. federation.
> Retrofitting modern features onto H.323 does not seem like fun. Because if SIP suffers from being too general, H.323 suffers from being way too specific in its architecture and technology requirements -- read through some of the associated specs, eg H.245, and it's not hard to see why SIP won. For the longest time, there was not even the notion of URI addressing...
Sorry to hear that. My general thought was that for a personal system, it would be way lower barrier to use existing h.323 server/clients, than to make a whole new protocol -- and that's probably true.
But if it has been effectively abandoned for a while, SIP might be better -- even if what one might effectively end up with is "proprietary" SIP, as one picks a subset that works for a particular use-case.
Personally I have to complementary goals: The first, and most important, is to build something that allows group chat with archiving, hopefully integrated with optional audio/video and some kind of media sharing (be that wiki, or something more traditional like straight up sharing of files/documents) [But it it should be obvious that by uploading to a wiki with shared authentication/authorization, one would only need to share an url over chat].
The second goal would be to enable federation, at least among those with the know-how/interest in running their own nodes.
Oh, and goal zero would be to retain control, so self-host (although option to get it "on tap" as a service would be nice), and Free/Open software/protocols.
In the end, perhaps XMPP along with just video/audio via WebRTC turns out to be the least worst option. I'm a little worried that the "web-centric" solutions like Mozilla Hello/together.js etc is difficult to pair up with command line clients, bots and/or make accessible for those that need it (eg: braille terminals). I guess audio might be preferred to braille in the general case, even for asynchronous messages, but text is very flexible (eg: text-to-speech system exists).
I was the editor of the H.323 spec years ago. Funny you would say that SIP looks like it comes from the telcos, when the whole aim with SIP was to create just the opposite. H.323 has often been accused of being created by telcos, too. Truth is, folks from the traditional enterprise voice equipment makers shaped both.
SIP was adopted by 3GPP in 1999 to be used in the mobile networks. Of course, that trickled throughout the telcos, so it now is widely used in the telco space. H.323 was widely used for PSTN backhauling to reduce tolls. However, SIP is more prevalent there, I'd guess.
Enterprise networks still use both H.323 and SIP, with more desk phones using SIP and videoconferencing equipment split, but moving to SIP.
That said, any move to SIP these days is only because there is nothing better. WebRTC is the next big thing. It borrows SDP from SIP, but no signaling protocol is defined.
Personally, I'd like to realize the vision behind what was intended to be H.325, which was to be a JSON-based signalling protocol that is fully distributed. Each application could implement whatever protocol it wanted, and they would all be associated through H.325, giving the user the feeling that these different applications work closely together. That would be possible, even when applications run on different devices.
Alas, there seems to be no financial motivator for those that control the market to explore that concept, so we're stuck with H.323, SIP, and WebRTC (and various proprietary glue pieces). The trend these days seems to be toward proprietary solutions, providing limited interop with others through SIP. Limited, as in nothing but basic voice and video.
I recently discovered DTLS and QUIC, of which DTLS appear to be most interesting as a "general use" thing. We do of course not actually have a shortage of protocols, but it'd be nice to have something that was a little more suited for the "new" Internet. Full authentication/encryption, something lighter than TCP for multimedia -- and something that actually has a hope of crossing cheap DSL routers.
QUIC looks interesting, but a) is very concentrated on being a transport for http/2, b) is in flux, and c) Google apparently haven't donated any code that makes sense for production (excepting client-side in Chromium).
DTLS is closely connected with WebRTC, has several implementations (though, apparently no support in Erlang/Elixir yet?) and given the current push behind WebRTC appears to be here to stay.
Honestly, I don't know how interesting "hardware phones" are anymore. As long as one can get something to work over wlan with android, things "should" be real-world deployable. And I don't have 100s of SIP devices, so I don't need to care ;-).
It may turn out that wlan+android+WebRTC+DTLS never achieves the kind of latency needed for good live video/audio... I haven't experimented that much, but hopefully it's "good enough".
At any rate, appears that SIP really is the only interop that currently works. At first glance it does seem a little complex for the use-case of text messages, inconvenient in terms of addressing -- but maybe a core focused on WebRTC/IPv6 with gateways for SIP the way to go.
Either way, I guess as long as no big players want interop, it doesn't really matter. One'll just have to make a solution that works for inter-org/inter-friends communication, with the option to federate with those interesting in joining/building a new network. Doesn't look like it'll be easy to take a bite out of FB Messenger/Google Hangouts/WhatsApp etc.
Identity is a separate problem. So far, https://www.accountchooser.com and OpenID is winning -- if by winning you mean maintaining a list of very popular email providers and using their APIs. ;-)
Yeah, I can't see Google ever either open sourcing Hangouts, or making it possible to federate it. Google's opinion seems to be that everything that is a service or protocol should be a Google API.
I remember reading about matrix when they first announced. Was pretty excited about it, haven't heard anything since. I
It's just tech though; even if it's mind-blowingly great, won't do much good if no large-scale userbase picks it up somehow.
We're still alive and going strong - currently supporting glossy client development like Vector.im and building out bridges to as many other networks as possible (IRC, Slack, HipChat etc) using http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge and similar. In terms of being picked up by a large user base... yes, we need it if we are to be really relevant. And that means relying on folks like those commenting on this thread to try using it, contributing to it, and help us make it better.
Whilst we're not trying to replace XMPP, Matrix.org does provide an entirely different architecture (decentralised and evetually-consistent history, high baseline feature set, HTTP-based, etc) that can be used for group chat/VoIP/etc.
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.
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.
Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.
This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.
What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015.
>This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC
There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do.
>and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.
Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it.
(Interoperability is orthogonal of course).
Slack and IRC are room-based, semi-synchronous, topic-centered communication protocols with support for direct messaging.
Slack literally took the concept of IRC and put a bunch of cool bells and whistles on it. They updated it, centralized it and sold the idea as an enterprise solution. It works great, and the tech could be a kickass replacement to IRC, done correctly.
I don't really disagree with you... but I often wonder how much Slack actually adds to IRC. We use it at work (and as a 100% remote person in a mostly co-located team, it is a godsend). I can't really think of anything in Slack that wouldn't be easy to implement with IRC bots.
Persistent history is easy. Email notification is easy. Storage of various assets like text snippets and pictures is easy. I've never used any, but I'm assuming that at least one of the web interfaces for IRC works well...
I think the main thing that Slack has done is package it up so that you don't need to cobble together 100 different things -- which is, of course, very valuable. Or at least more valuable than the monthly cost that they charge ;-)
To be honest, I would really rather be using free software. I would be quite happy to pay for a service that made it easy for me (as Slack does), but software freedom is valuable to me.
I've wondered the same. Like you said, though, there is value in packaging useful features together.
IRC is "You could do that ...", while Slack is "You can do that". So like you're saying, you could set up a bunch of channel bots (And for what it's worth, I think channel bots are fairly ugly. If I say "Let's work on #133", I want #133 to be linked, I don't want a different user spewing 3 lines of noise and a long link). But most people won't do that because it's too much of a hassle. So most of IRC does not showcase what's really possible.
Like I mentioned in the g+ rant I linked above, it'd be possible to improve this by adding scripting features and such to IRC servers. But nobody's doing that. The harsh reality is that "could" is a long, long way from "can".
> To be honest, I would really rather be using free software.
Me too, man. Me too. I don't use Slack out of principle, and I'm a heavy IRC user. Sadly it doesn't often compare :/
> There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do.
That's kind of a weird statement to me, because every time I've sold a techie-type person on Slack it's been by describing it as "private IRC with persistent history and a bunch of other neat things".
You're missing the point. Just because it's not what they're aiming to do doesn't mean the tech isn't appropriate for it.
You're commenting on their business model rather than the tech. For all you know, Slack could be planning to expand their business to hosting public chat rooms, then your comment wouldn't make any sense anymore.
You can already get a hacked up public chat via Slack. There's a package (which is all set to run on Heroku) that automates the process of sending an invite to the Slack organization so that anyone on the public web can do it.
I noticed this when the Bootstrap 4.0a announcement had a link inviting you to join their Slack:
> For those jamming on v4 with us, we also have a dedicated v4 Slack channel. Jump in to talk shop and work with your fellow Bootstrappers. If you haven’t yet, join our official Slack room![0].
The problem is not just the open vs closed source. Even if Google, Yahoo, Slack all open source their products. You'd still not be able to send messages from one to another unless they also federate at the protocol level.
So you can be connected with a universal "messaging" client to any of the available servers then send messages to someone on Google, or Slack etc.
As noted in the OP, Zulip is not a closed-source product anymore. But I'm not sure that really helps so much with the immediate problem, since it's more the proliferation of protocols rather than the scarcity of source that causes issues.
Yes, that's the title of the thread, you can assume I read that far at least ;) I'll give you I wasn't very clear.
I'm super excited Zulip is going open source. And it's both the proliferation of protocols and the closed-sourceness(?) of the products that is problematic.
Open source has two coupled benefits:
1. If the product becomes popular, it's easy to integrate with it, extend it, modify it, etc rather than just write an alternative from the ground up. This prevents the proliferation of new protocols just for the sake of an alternative. Right now, it makes no sense for me to go and build a FOSS alternative to Zulip. It would've made sense a few weeks ago. FOSS web services encourage/promote self-hosting. This also counts for something.
2. When extending a foss product, writing a gateway is a lot easier. Gateways don't slow down proliferation as much, but they do keep protocols somewhat close to one another and make it easier for users to migrate from one another. For example: It's been several years now and there is still no reliable open source XMPP-to-Hangouts gateway. But a Zulip/IRC gateway? If one doesn't exist already, I bet you there'll be one within weeks.
To dive a bit deeper, while XMPP/IRC exists, and it wouldn't be hard to make the Zulip server natively speak XMPP to clients, that in-and-of-itself wouldn't be quite useful. A message sent to stream "ops" with topic "prod deploy" might look like this†:
But one more protocol on the stack with mac/windows/iphone/android clients is, IMHO, an entirely different ball of wax than a libre project with only a single platform under its belt. In my situation, the existence of mobile clients is clinch for actually pitching it to any org I participate in.
Yep, we have a channel for developers that integrate with our product instead of having them email us. It's pretty efficient, but the fragmentation risk is there.
What annoys me about stuff like Slack is that it's misused. It's made for small teams but I've been 10k people open source projects use it instead of IRC. Of course, it was laggy and they eventually couldn't afford it.
That was the biggest annoyance I experienced at companies that based their communications around IM clients like AIM or Gtalk. My previous company switched to HipChat at some point and everyone showing up as their real name instead of some stupid username was a surprisingly huge improvement.
And backlog/offline message functionality is available by turning on logging and using a ZNC proxy. My "buddy list" is just a bunch of direct message channels that I keep open.
But this is about social norms, not technology. Hear the phrase "remote workers...tap lightly on the shoulder".
We have had thousands of years to work out our nuances over interruptions and social signals when around the same campfire.
But suddenly (and from the past 20-30 years suddenly) we have phone conferences where half the conversation is "no, sorry, you go ahead" and email going from killer app to no longer being a way to get a reply in ten minutes but two days because the signal to noise ratio hit a tipping point somewhere around 2006. (No it's not spam, that's mostly a done problem. It's co-worker spam that's clogging our minds of not our inboxes)
So the differences between Zulip and Twitter and Slack and IRC and Microsoft bloody communicator why does it not know about tabs ffs! (Sorry). The difference with all of these is not their technology - it's pretty much the same all the time - but their social utility.
One day some comms package will get it all together (I think there is too little context to get it right yet) and we will all go"of course".
Until then we will try each different social choices baked into the code - rooms or tags or whatever. Maybe the next step is to have rooms for something, open cry for others.
Who knows - maybe we should look at pubs bars, libraries and streets for inspiration.
Whatever it is - Zulip is not the right solution nor is it the best - it is one more random mutation in the evolution of remote communication.
We (https://actor.im) are actually working on this, but not trying to connect slack, but building telegram, skype, whatsapp, social networks to one, slack like interface that will help you easily manage communications from many networks.
This is not our main feature, just something like side project.
I also really dislike the idea of having to register with a phone number. I reminds me of ICQ, where I had to dig up some obscure number to log in. Except, I also lose my account permanently the moment I lose my phone.
This is the regrettable de-facto standard. I'd like to see the opposite: a network that provides native desktop clients. Telegram seems to be the only one taking this seriously up to now.
that would be great. what would be greater though is ensuring that actor.im cannot read the data as it transits (or easy to setup on our own local machines)
We had e2e encryption in the past, but we decided to make one click install of your own server or may be just key infrastructure to make everything cool.
This is precisely the problem we're working on with Matrix.org - providing a standard API that can be used to bridge together all of these different protocols in one decentralised model. It's better than Trillian in that the defragmentation happens serverside and you can use any compatible client with it (or one of the existing services if you prefer). For instance, we turned on our first Matrix<->Slack bridge this week - see https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/... for how easy it was.
There have been and always will be competing products and communities that serve similar purposes. We use what we think is the best one. Is this a bad thing?
(Not to mention the fact that Slack is for internal teams, not for IRC-like discussions, though our open newsroom (http://newsroom.grasswire.com) and some other communities (http://fpchat.com) have repurposed it for that.
I think that "best tool for the job" attitude is a straw man. It seems to presuppose that "the job" is per-organisation, or even that there is one job.
In truth many of us believe that the goal is enabling everyone - universally - to communicate without a single body holding centralised control of message history, reachability and access.
Quick review of the globally federated protocols:
Email is too slow and bulky and lacks "group" capability
IRC is deeply unreliable and lacks identity, archiving, and media management
NNTP is too amorphous, slow, and lacks any privacy or security controls
Everyone thinks SIP is just for telephony (it isn't)
XMPP is phenomenally complicated yet held great promise
- if only everyone could agree on the extensions and semantics.
- but was murdered by Google.
You forgot h.323. On the surface, it looks to me like a "saner SIP", or XMPP with working, standard audio/video support -- but I might be wrong.
I'm not sure why people claim IRC lacks archiving support. Isn't a bit like saying SMTP lacks archiving support? And doesn't basic IRC always go through a server? So there shouldn't be any technical barrier against a server archiving all chats (private and in channels)?
As for NNTP, I'm not sure if NNTP over TLS, peering with only trusted sites (aka for internal use) would make sense or not. I never did use Usenet much. At least the D language forums have made an effort to bring NNTP into the www era[d].
It's interesting that no one seems to do a decent job of (server side) archiving for XMPP -- partly I think it's because as you state, the XEPs have gotten out of hand -- and partly XMPP appears to be especially popular for users that want privacy -- and treat ephemeral chat as a feature.
(format note, you probably should've just listed the protocols in separate paragraphs, as indented blocks with lines longer than ~50 characters doesn't format very well on hn).
Good thought re.H.323, it is often forgotten in these discussions, in part because many implementers resent binary protocols and the ITU has few friends outside the telephony world. https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/
The IRC protocol is neither sophisticated nor scalable enough that we can all federate our private trusted IRC servers. IRC services are severely limited by being a brittle undirected acyclic graph of servers with little but text forwarding in the protocol. Trying to do anything sophisticated like e.g. identity management, is an ugly business.
NNTP has no identity scheme and no private channel. Running it over TLS doesn't change that. You can forge an ersatz private channel with encryption (I once did so, using Usenet as a message queue to backhaul out-of-band service alerts) - but it's neither pretty nor grandma friendly.
I suppose the difference between our points of view is that I would much rather have a better tool than a publicly accessible archive of message history.
Yup, it's a big shame. XMPP promised for quite a while, but then stagnated and failed to deliver what most users were expecting (mostly due to implementations, not lack of protocol features).
I've recently given up on IM, and written about it recently:
It would require changes to the core of the protocol itself, and that all deployments update to a version of the app that implements those changes. Pretty hard, yet possible.
Wow, out of all the things that may have occurred to me over the last couple years of using Slack, "this feels like 1999" is definitely not one of them.
One could say that OS-level notifications could be considered a crude replacement of an aggregation tool like Trillian. We didn't have these back in the ICQ days and today it's easier (read: less painful) to listen on multiple messaging apps. Especially on mobile devices.
Amazon for a long time (maybe even today) used IRC for 1:N communication. I personally like IRC over anything else, but I am probably just too old... :)
The article is completely by side the point. He's basically ranting about how they can't test systemd on all distros, because every distro does things differently. How to fix it? Virtualize distros, yay. That may fix your problem, but no one else's.
The real point is that, due to distro fragmentation, Linux gives the casual user an inconvenient shared library linkage experience. At the same time the distros are really good as packaging software, which gives us the "one-click install" experience we're so use to. But they do so, at the price of compatibility, so we have the current distro lock-in situation.
Anyway, as an upstream software developer, I see the medal from the side of library linkage: when my program starts, the dynamic linker resolves this big list of symbols that my program contains and finds me matching libraries. You can extend this paradigm to icons, locale, and other support files as well.
So who tells the dynamic linker which symbols to match? Well, the contents of the shared libraries, and these already contain versioned symbols (e.g. this memcpy@1.0 does this, memcpy@1.1 doesnt do that anymore). The easiest solution to the matching problem is static linking. But that's not what we really want, because we may actually want to replace symbols with better versions (due to security fixes, faster implementations, super-set of features, etc).
And who versions symbols? Well, usually the upstream developers of the important libraries do. And they do that somewhat remarkably well already, but it could be better. If your program uses an upstream that doesnt version things, well, bad choice, static linking is probably the best solution here.
So what I would propose, is to move the problem down to a linkage problem, with better consensus between binary creators and upstream authors on how to version symbols. And if my system currently doesnt have a matching symbol installed? Just download it from the distro's well-versioned repositories, maybe not the whole gtk+ library, but a diff of it to another version.
We would then in the end not have a package installer, but a fetcher-of-missing-versioned-symbols-for-a-binary installer. But this model is pretty far fetched, since the current method of compiling code into monolithic shared libraries is much simpler. On the other hand, the linux dynamic linker is already very intelligent, maybe it's time for the large distros to cooperate on this level.
To make it I needed a C++ version with iterators, which I though would be faster. But it is still about 20% slower than stable_sort for the default random input test. It probably also stays the same for other inputs.
