While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.
Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?
We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.
So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there.
But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.
It's also instructive to reflect over the other federated internet communications protocol: E-mail.
It pretty much works, and that's great, but barely a week goes by when HN doesn't have an article lamenting the lack of useful spam-control or encryption/sender verification and many other things. E-mail is still a very poor medium to facilitate long threads with many participants. E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking. E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.
These deficiencies are all easy to fix in a technical sense, but practically impossible to address due to the federated nature of the system. The few changes we do end up getting (HTML bodies, and even MIME before then) are long and painful, and are largely resolved by "might is right". Others unilaterally break fundamental features, such as curbing spam by essentially banning decentralised SMTP. If you rely on being able to send out large quantities of email, you either have to pay a gatekeeper, or hire a specialist in the dark arts of actually have your email go through. This dark art consists of keeping track of the many ways in which the large players in the e-mail world systematically break the protocol to combat spam.
We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.
XMPP fails because it tries to, indeed needs to, boil the ocean. There's an extension, or two or seven, for every conceivable feature and use case, and so you need to choose which set of features in a n-furcated (where n is tragically large) set you want/need, and live with the fact the these aren't perfectly compatible with deployments that has made other choices. And so the federation and standards compatibility is really only theoretical, and then, what's the point? If spam killed truly federated email (and the need for actual working encryption might well finish it off), mobile killed XMPP.
Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.
> E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.
Jira, for example, has a pretty good one.
> We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.
I've been running my own mail stack for 8+ years. The reason is simple: only I can mess it up. No 3rd party to lock me out from my communication, no 3rd party to decide what I can send. If it fails, it's my fault only.
And I'm still using email. I do occasionally get spam, but most of them is already dropped by blacklisting and a few intelligent rule; the rest is catched by dspam.
XMPP is overcomplicated, solving nothing IRC can't solve already ( imho, of course ); that is why it's failing.
What we need for the more open source approach is people to value their communication and not to trust 3rd party because the look/act cool.
> Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.
They won't. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness.
It's my understanding that the biggest hurdle in owning your own email stack is that a lot of 3rd parties decide what they'll receive, and hold senders to very strict standards. Have you experienced many issues with recipients on various platforms not receiving your emails?
I have worked in this area for a long time, and it's very rare that this causes any problems unless you are a spammer (or "news-letter sender"). You won't end up on black lists unless there is a mistake. It's an annoyance when that happens, but that happens for the major players as well.
I often feel the ambivalence to your own mail servers is unfounded. A basic apt-get for Postfix and Dovecot will give you secure defaults. The only thing you need to do then is to set up the certificates, the dns records, and keep up with what happens in the future. It's absolutely comparable to running your own web server, where you also need to change a cert or two over time.
> They won't. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness.
They (the incumbents) won't. But someone will, in the same way that WordPress replaced hosted blog platforms for many. Might be wishful thinking, but this seems like it could happen some day.
Regarding Docker: You can easily run your own Docker container registry. The DockerHub UI isn't open source, but the underlying server and protocol for fetching/uploading images is.
There are several companies that have implemented alternative container registries. Google (Google Container Registry), CoreOS (Quay) , and JFrog (Artifactory) all come to mind.
> the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.
Mostly because some industry giants first moved to support it then yanked the rug out from under it when they realized it reduced the amount of end-user lock-in.
RSS is not federated. Each server serves its own content, and clients connect directly to them.
It's decentralized, not federated, just like the web.
I think RSS failed because of the bad user experience it provides. Unless you are following hundreds of feeders, it's much easier to just go to their site, than to open a reader, get maybe one line without context - or some text that isn't in the article at all, click there and go to the site.
It's funny, RSS is in principle the same as many socially-powered link aggregators (reddit, HN, 9gag, etc) except you're fully in control of the content you subscribe to. I guess that introduces the hurdle of finding content worth subscribing to, but most online RSS aggregators I've seen have offered some sort of discoverability systems.
There's lots of misery and soul searching about the failure of federated chat on here, but all the slack-likes that are gaining usage are proof that the opportunity to fix this is still open.
A federated chat that had a good user experience and ideally a feature that appeals to a niche (e.g. easy voice chat for gamers like discord app) could still make headway.
In fact, the proliferation of new niche clients with relatively easy integrations is the kind of situation in which a federation standard could thrive.
"we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products"
One area which hasn't (yet?) succumbed to this is podcasts. The podcast clients I use (Overcast on iOS and Pocket Casts on Android) will accept an RSS URL, and most (all?) podcasts provide such a URL.
My issue with that is the first great online walled garden was AOL and they were competing against (using and cutting off) SMTP. So there was a ready made, open, federated solution waiting to burst out.
Whereas in Facebook, Google etc, the open solution is usually following the walled garden. I yearn for open solutions but they will have to follow open internet access (local grids) and then the economics of sending a packet to SF in order to message my next door neighbour becomes more obvious.
Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?
We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.
So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there.
But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.