There is a significant difference between developing and promoting a protocol (such as XMPP) and a product (such as Signal). Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. This post details how and why Snikket aims to strike a balance between the two.
I mean, XMPP did get uptake. Google Talk used federated XMPP at one point in time. But…there’s not much money for a service provider in an open, competitive market. If you can get enough users, you want to put up walls, leverage network effect. Then you get to have a monopoly on access to your users, and there’s more money to be had. So there’s always going to be people trying to get everyone into a single provider.
I think that with email, the magic factor was that there was no one entity large enough to pull that off at the time that email became common. Today, there are actually startlingly few email service providers of the “pay me a fee, I give you a couple mailboxes” variety – I was amazed when I went looking this year. I’m wondering whether email might become a walled garden before messaging stops being a walled garden.
That sounds roughly correct, though I don’t see the connection with the article? Unless you’re saying that “products” (like Signal) will always exist, which is probably true but is orthogonal to whether or not other models will succeed.
As for email, I think posteo does a pretty good job, but you’re right options are few and far between. But self hosting email is just as viable as ever? Perhaps less so since e.g. gmail will instantly flag your incoming mail as spam if you’re sending it from randomsite.tld, but honestly that issue hasn’t gotten that bad (yet). Yes, whenever there’s a protocol like email or xmpp, companies will create gmails and signals and turn them into walled gardens, but that doesn’t spoil the protocol for everyone else. It just causes frustration that companies build closed products on top of open technologies, but not much to be done about that.
That sounds roughly correct, though I don’t see the connection with the article?
It’s saying that XMPP didn’t take off. I’m saying that there was some uptake (well, of federated XMPP…that’s an important distinction, because a business running an in-house XMPP server that can’t talk to the outside world doesn’t really address the same issues), but that services shifted away from it because they didn’t want to have the kind of open ecosystem.
I think that that’s a problem for anyone trying to encourage adoption of an open ecosystem. I don’t care about XMPP as a protocol versus some other messaging protocol much, but I care a fair bit about the wdespread adoption of federated XMPP.
That is, IIRC it was Meta that talked about linking up to the Fediverse a while back. But…one would want to understand what their end game is. If it’s to do a Google Talk, to help bootstrap a new walled garden, that may be a problem.
I’m not accusing the author here of aiming to do that either, but it’d be a concern that would be in the back of my mind – if this service using this protocol becomes very popular, will the service seek to eliminate the open role of the protocol.
self hosting email is just as viable as ever?
I used to do that, but anti-spam mechanisms finally reached the point where I wasn’t willing to hassle with it – running your own mail server tends to trip a number of anti-spam mechanisms in various mail servers.
but that services shifted away from it because they didn’t want to have the kind of open ecosystem.
Well, of course some part of that is true, but the “death” of XMPP wasn’t walled gardens, it was text messaging.
I studied, graduated and worked literally all the 2000s at a German university in the middle of nowhere. Which was for some weird reason at the technological vanguard. We had Facebook before Facebook existed. Everyone who lived on campus had 100 Mbps Ethernet and was 24/7 online, at a time when Germany extremely slowly picked up DSL and maybe used email.
Rarely anyone except the nerdiest of nerds used jabber (or IRC), but what really everyone had constantly running was ICQ. That “oh-oh” sound still haunts me.
Most of the people already had mobile phones of course, but texting was still prohibitively expensive, especially considering that you had a free always online service at home.
But over time “flat rates” for text messages became cheaper and cheaper, and here’s the thing: ICQ/XMPP/etc never really worked on mobile phones, and at that time most of the people didn’t use “smartphones” anyway.
So more and more people just flat out stopped using instant messaging in favor of texting. Much to the chagrin of the people who couldn’t afford a flat rate… I vividly remember heated arguments from people who were suddenly cut off from their social life. It really had a measurable effect on social circles on campus.
And there wasn’t a big migration of people from ICQ to Google who then got locked in. I don’t remember anyone using Google Talk at all. ICQ and instant messaging just died – surprisingly quickly I might add. Or rather, it went into hiatus until iMessages and Whatsapp appeared.
I don’t care about XMPP as a protocol versus some other messaging protocol much, but I care a fair bit about the wdespread adoption of federated XMPP
I don’t quite understand what this means, could you elaborate?
if this service using this protocol becomes very popular, will the service seek to eliminate the open role of the protocol
That is a valid concern, though the point of the article is to try and convince people why it won’t happen like it did with Google or might with Meta for structural reasons (rather than “oh but we’re different” reasons).
The main difference I see with Snikket vs Google Talk is that Snikket is not only libre client software, but libre server software as well. The point of Snikket is that individual people host it themselves, not that the Snikket devs run a bunch of Snikket servers which require their Snikket client for connection and just so happen to use xmpp to power it. Really all Snikket is (right now) is a prosody server with some pre-configurations and easy install, as well as an android/ios app which are general xmpp clients that are designed to work well when connected with Snikket servers.
Now it could still go south in a similar way to Google Talk, in that maybe a bunch of people start running Snikket servers and using Snikket clients, and then the Snikket devs start wall gardening the implementation. That would be bad, but the users (both server runners and client users) would be in a much stronger position to pivot away from those decisions.
I think it’s at least an interesting idea (hence why I posted it) for the reasons the author mentions: striking a balance between trustless freedom and interface stability/agility.
I mean, XMPP did get uptake. Google Talk used federated XMPP at one point in time. But…there’s not much money for a service provider in an open, competitive market. If you can get enough users, you want to put up walls, leverage network effect. Then you get to have a monopoly on access to your users, and there’s more money to be had. So there’s always going to be people trying to get everyone into a single provider.
I think that with email, the magic factor was that there was no one entity large enough to pull that off at the time that email became common. Today, there are actually startlingly few email service providers of the “pay me a fee, I give you a couple mailboxes” variety – I was amazed when I went looking this year. I’m wondering whether email might become a walled garden before messaging stops being a walled garden.
That sounds roughly correct, though I don’t see the connection with the article? Unless you’re saying that “products” (like Signal) will always exist, which is probably true but is orthogonal to whether or not other models will succeed.
As for email, I think posteo does a pretty good job, but you’re right options are few and far between. But self hosting email is just as viable as ever? Perhaps less so since e.g. gmail will instantly flag your incoming mail as spam if you’re sending it from randomsite.tld, but honestly that issue hasn’t gotten that bad (yet). Yes, whenever there’s a protocol like email or xmpp, companies will create gmails and signals and turn them into walled gardens, but that doesn’t spoil the protocol for everyone else. It just causes frustration that companies build closed products on top of open technologies, but not much to be done about that.
It’s saying that XMPP didn’t take off. I’m saying that there was some uptake (well, of federated XMPP…that’s an important distinction, because a business running an in-house XMPP server that can’t talk to the outside world doesn’t really address the same issues), but that services shifted away from it because they didn’t want to have the kind of open ecosystem.
I think that that’s a problem for anyone trying to encourage adoption of an open ecosystem. I don’t care about XMPP as a protocol versus some other messaging protocol much, but I care a fair bit about the wdespread adoption of federated XMPP.
That is, IIRC it was Meta that talked about linking up to the Fediverse a while back. But…one would want to understand what their end game is. If it’s to do a Google Talk, to help bootstrap a new walled garden, that may be a problem.
I’m not accusing the author here of aiming to do that either, but it’d be a concern that would be in the back of my mind – if this service using this protocol becomes very popular, will the service seek to eliminate the open role of the protocol.
I used to do that, but anti-spam mechanisms finally reached the point where I wasn’t willing to hassle with it – running your own mail server tends to trip a number of anti-spam mechanisms in various mail servers.
Well, of course some part of that is true, but the “death” of XMPP wasn’t walled gardens, it was text messaging.
I studied, graduated and worked literally all the 2000s at a German university in the middle of nowhere. Which was for some weird reason at the technological vanguard. We had Facebook before Facebook existed. Everyone who lived on campus had 100 Mbps Ethernet and was 24/7 online, at a time when Germany extremely slowly picked up DSL and maybe used email.
Rarely anyone except the nerdiest of nerds used jabber (or IRC), but what really everyone had constantly running was ICQ. That “oh-oh” sound still haunts me.
Most of the people already had mobile phones of course, but texting was still prohibitively expensive, especially considering that you had a free always online service at home.
But over time “flat rates” for text messages became cheaper and cheaper, and here’s the thing: ICQ/XMPP/etc never really worked on mobile phones, and at that time most of the people didn’t use “smartphones” anyway.
So more and more people just flat out stopped using instant messaging in favor of texting. Much to the chagrin of the people who couldn’t afford a flat rate… I vividly remember heated arguments from people who were suddenly cut off from their social life. It really had a measurable effect on social circles on campus.
And there wasn’t a big migration of people from ICQ to Google who then got locked in. I don’t remember anyone using Google Talk at all. ICQ and instant messaging just died – surprisingly quickly I might add. Or rather, it went into hiatus until iMessages and Whatsapp appeared.
I don’t quite understand what this means, could you elaborate?
That is a valid concern, though the point of the article is to try and convince people why it won’t happen like it did with Google or might with Meta for structural reasons (rather than “oh but we’re different” reasons).
The main difference I see with Snikket vs Google Talk is that Snikket is not only libre client software, but libre server software as well. The point of Snikket is that individual people host it themselves, not that the Snikket devs run a bunch of Snikket servers which require their Snikket client for connection and just so happen to use xmpp to power it. Really all Snikket is (right now) is a prosody server with some pre-configurations and easy install, as well as an android/ios app which are general xmpp clients that are designed to work well when connected with Snikket servers.
Now it could still go south in a similar way to Google Talk, in that maybe a bunch of people start running Snikket servers and using Snikket clients, and then the Snikket devs start wall gardening the implementation. That would be bad, but the users (both server runners and client users) would be in a much stronger position to pivot away from those decisions.
I think it’s at least an interesting idea (hence why I posted it) for the reasons the author mentions: striking a balance between trustless freedom and interface stability/agility.
Thankfully not even Gmail could become a walled garden since it’s expected for a decent company to have its own domain (and email address).