Re: Why XMPP?

Sorry for the confusion. Normally when I reply to a message from a
mailing list, my email client automatically addresses it to the list.
For some reason that didn't happen here.

I think I understand your perspective at this point and don't have time
to discuss it further. However, I did not intend to make the
conversation private, and your last message has some good information,
particularly about some problems with Matrix, so I am copying this to
the list. (Not that the majority of members who use the forum will be
able to follow it, since most of this conversation has probably been
buried in the Purism thread, and this message will likely appear as a
new thread without that context.)

On 03/18, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Was your message intended to be non-public? If yes, why? If no, feel free to remail my reply to list as well.
>
> <name at domain> wrote:
> > On 03/15, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> >> > There is too much delay between the sending and receiving of an email.
> >>
> >> How much exactly? I never experienced such a problem since POP3 went out of use. You might have misconfigured your server.
> >
> > It is common for email to take up to a minute. Sometimes more.
>
> I had not witnessed such lags for a very long time. More than a decade. May I ask, where did you?
>
> > It's just not intended for real-time communication.
>
> I sill not quite understand, why do we keep calling this ‘real-time’, while it’s obviously discrete, but anyway — times change: Unix-like OSes were not intended for personal computers, but became so. Linux® was not intended for pocket computers, but now they’ve outnumbered all other machines running that kernel by many times. Android was not intended for lightbulbs, but now it’s no longer laughable. Email was not intended to be delivered faster than it could be read, but now it is.
>
> >>> The fact that every AIM/Whatsapp/Signal/XMPP user has also used email shows that these tools have different functions.
> >>
> >> Actually, no, it does not show that. It only shows that email is more useful, and even if you have signed up for all these networks, you still need an email.
> >
> > The second part of what you say is true, but the converse is also true: Even if they have email, many people still need or want some of those networks.
>
> Not necessary. They might want one of those _clients_ instead. Note, that none of those Skypes, Whatsapps, etc advertises itself as a network, always as an ‘app’.
>
> >>> Gmail's web client has a chat client built in so that Gmail users can chat with each other in real-time, not a feature that would make sense if email on its own were suitable for this purpose.
> >>
> >> Of course, it makes a perfect sense! That is, to lure users from an open network to Google’s locked-in one.
> >
> > I agree that this is almost certainly Google's motivation for adding the feature, but that is not the user's motivation for using it. They use it because it is is better for quick, back-and-forth communication that has the flow of spoken conversation.
>
> Again, what ‘it’? A client — sure, I have no doubt, that in the light of the said purpose Google is fully capable of making it more usable than their client for Gmail. A network — I do have doubts, that Gmail-to-Gmail communication is notably faster than Hangouts-to-Hangouts. Did anyone test it?
>
> > Telling a Facebook Messenger user to use email instead is like telling a Google Calendar user to use LibreOffice Calc instead.
>
> Sorry, I didn’t get a joke. (Presumably, because I never used neither Facebook Messenger nor Google Calendar.)
>
> > I have actually had people laugh at me for asking them to send an email because I don't use Facebook Messenger.
>
> Pardon for inquiring, but did they explain their laugh in any way?
>
> > You began this question by asking why you should recommend XMPP over a free alternative, not over a proprietary one. My answer is basically that no one is using a free alternative. The only one I know of is Matrix, and as far as I can tell it is even less popular than XMPP (although I don't know this for a fact.)
>
> Matrix? That’s curious in the context of our discussion, since when I tried it not so long ago, Matrix per se had _not_ been operating on top of a live connection, it had been _pulling_ new messages by establishing connection ab ovo — up from TLS handshake — every certain interval. Hello, POP3!
>
> False impression of ‘real-time’ was created by a mere fact that it pulled very _often_; and, of course, by an immense progress in networking since the day we first met email, that made this mess possible. Given their protocol architecture — it is designed on top of pure HTTP, I have doubts about future improvements on that.
>
> That is, Matrix as a protocol seems less suited to ‘real-time’ conversation than IMAP. By extension, matrix.org seems less suited for ‘real-time’ conversation than a decent gratis email service.
>
> Networking aside, this misdesign is sill a problem with regard to energy consumption. So, for the couple of their recommended Android client (Riot.im) and their own ‘canonical’ server instance (matrix.org), they mitigated the issue... by using Google’s proprietary notifications aggregator (FCM), which demand running nonfree (and even nonredistributable) ‘Google Services’ client on your Android machine.
>
> By the way, you have to solve a Google’s ReCAPTCHA to sign up there (on matrix.org, I mean).