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XMPP!

XMPP peeps: Email is a lost cause, a dead horse, it’s unpossible

Also XMPP peeps: Everyone needs to get on OMEMO, all old jabber clients are obsolete and need to be thrown away

Not sure why one of them can be improved and the other can’t…

If you're here looking for my XMPP address, it's sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org (same as my email address. I prefer email.)

I was hanging out with some XMPP fans and they were very gracious & kind & patient, and have not consented to this blog post so I’m gonna be super vague about them!

I generally like XMPP. Y’all know I snipe at the Matrix protocol sometimes which maybe as a li’l throwing stones in glass houses since I’m on ActivityPub which is almost as messy as Matrix, but XMPP I’m generally respectful of. Unlike Matrix, it has an architecture that makes sense. Me and my friends play D&D over XMPP and have done so for over two hundred sessions (after seven years of playing at the table).

Now to the point: the XMPP folks I talked to hated email! I’m sure they don’t speak for everyone in XMPP but they were like “email is a lost cause, hopeless, abandon, I don’t even use it”. But email is to XMPP as XMPP is to Matrix: it’s the original & best!

Email RFCs > XMPP XEPs > Matrix SCPs.

Email has a trail of lukewarm, picked-over, abandoned implementations that could not keep up with how the protocol evolved. Servers that don’t support DKIM, clients that don’t understand mimetypes etc. But. So does XMPP.

I’m still hoping we get double ratchet for email. Some sort of OMEMO-like setup. Hopefully more stale than XMPP’s OMEMO which has been changing namespaces incompatibly.