Re: GNOME Chat and the future of instant messaging in gnome

[Kristian Rink <kawazu428 gmail com>]

Am 21.10.2015 um 20:54 schrieb Charles Johnson:
> Popular protocols go out of style and become so losing backward
> compatibility. On the contrary, with the OpenSource protocols does
> not happen. I use XMPP almost from its inception, and still valid for
> my contacts find me from my business card.
>

Maybe a bit off, but I would add another thing here: At the very least 
these means of communication are easily available on Software Libre or 
FOSS environments. Back "then" when I started using Linux on my 
desktops, browser choice on that platform essentially was limited to 
Netscape Navigator / Communicator 4.x (still one of the worst pieces of 
software I used so far), and there was an extensive list of technologies 
and features that locked Linux users out.

These days, we do have choices of browsers, we do have technologies such 
as HTML5 or JavaScript, and we do have a desktop that runs apps written 
in JavaScript. Likewise, I see more and more people using 
HTM5+JavaScript on frameworks such as Apache Cordova for building 
platform-agnostic mobile applications. How long until an HTML5 based 
client to some of the newer cloud services (Facebook, Google Hangouts, 
...) natively will run on a GNOME / Linux desktop?


> On the other hand, MTProto (Telegram) is a new protocol, open source,
> designed for security and cloud-based technology. Is that
> innovation?

Will MTProto eventually be adopted by GNOME Online Accounts or any other 
GNOME application some day?


> If you use Empathy client is not a offering all the options from XMPP
> protocol. -OTR encryption -Advanced gateway settings -Advanced vCard
> editing -change Password -Other advanced options related autio/video
> (etc)

Well yes. This is one of my first impressions of Empathy too. Been using 
pidgin for a while, started using gajim just a few months ago as it 
seems to work better with our internal XMPP server. There are some 
things that, nevertheless, still aren't completely "fun" about XMPP - 
like building a setup with a mobile device and a desktop in which 
notifications always go to the device I work on _and_ still all the 
messages are available on all devices. Trying to do so I got completely 
lost somewhere in between XMPP specifications and drafts, different 
servers implementing a different set of features and different clients 
providing a vague different set of functionality too (most multiprotocol 
chat clients obviously seem not a good choice when it comes to using 
XMPP specific features). Catering to such use cases in my opinion is 
something most of the "open source" approaches aren't yet completely up 
to, at least compared to other approaches including mobile devices 
(looking at Telegram again).

Cheers,
Kristian