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A dive into open chat protocols
DiveIntoOpenChat - A dive into open chat protocols - Discord - XMPP - Matrix - Conclusions - Appendix: How to revive XMPP - Appendix 2: Discussion A dive into open chat protocols I’m between projects right now, so as is my idiom I’m going to take some random topic that has caught me on a manic swing in my little bipolar life, and dive deeper into it for a few days. One of the low-key topics in the back of my mind is that “the world needs an open chat protocol that doesn’t suck”, and something made me start thinking seriously about XMPP again for the first time in a decade.
File retention, deletion and deciding who to show it to are explicitly out of scope for that standard; most of it is offloaded onto an external HTTP server doing the media storage, but there is a section in the spec about expiration and timeouts, CORS, and sanitizing content. Each HTTP request is probably gonna involve a fair bit of redundant information in headers again, but if the XMPP TCP stream goes poof then it needs to re-establish it do negotiation and stuff all over again before it can start sending new messages. I have high hopes for the concept, by all means play with Secure Scuttlebutt and cool LoRa hacks and all that stuff… but distributed networks take all the Hard Problems that Discord deals with, both social and tech, and makes them 100x harder.
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