Sat, 17 Oct 2015 21:32:21 GMT
External Content not shown. Further Information. With all the new social networks, Jabber is getting less and less popular, and it has gotten a lot harder to convince even people with computer experience to get an Jabber account and be online on it.
In fact, there are some problems with the XMPP protocol.
Probably the worst one is the fact that I haven't seen any server that correctly handles multiple clients, and doesn't lose messages when used on a mobile phone. My server has tcp keepalives activated and pings in regular intervals – which increases the traffic but also makes it sigificantly less probable to lose messages on connection loss. There are proposed solutions to this, which will hopefully be more widespread some time in the future; for now, this problem exists.
Another severe problem came up when Google dropped its XMPP federation support. I still don't quite understand why they did so, but keep this in mind: A Google account ist not a full Jabber account anymore!
Yet another argument I often hear is that Jabber is not widespread. "None of my friends use it." – well, then convince them to use it. Be the first to have an account and spread it.
It's not like it costs anything or is complicated. It's not hard to have a jabber account and be online from time to time even though you don't use it much. If you worry about the system resources and the traffic, I can assure you that your Facebook- and Whatsapp- and Whatnot-apps are probably worse.
It is not even about destroying Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. – it is about limiting their power. It is about having a fallback solution when they decide to become evil – so they have a pressure not to become evil.
It's your little part for the freedom of the internet, for your freedom. Is that really too much?