I think the point that FOSS enthusiasts fail to understand repeatedly is that once a protocol becomes so embedded and fractured over multiple implementations, it becomes impossible to change.
There have been efforts to modernise irc as well but IRC still isn’t even keeping pace, let alone catching up.
I think the easiest way to handle this is to actually just drop legacy and start again when you reach this point. It is infinitely easier to build your own solution from scratch than it is to move a mountain and convince an existing community and ecosystem to do what you think is best.
And matrix is proof this works. After trying it again this year, I think they have finally created a product which works really well.
> And matrix is proof this works. After trying it again this year, I think they have finally created a product which works really well.
The server and clients improved. The protocol did not improve.
The protocol is still designed to be a metadata sponge that proliferates this data as far as possible. There’s no way you’d design it in the same way today if you didn’t have intelligence funding in the earliest stages…
If XMPP clients improved, you’d say the same thing. “Wow, I guess XMPP works”
I don't think I'd characterize HTTP as having fractured in anything like the way XMPP has, which seems to have deliberately chosen a wild-west approach to extensibility vs. HTTP's more modest evolution. Until we got http2 and http3 in a span of 5 years, but that's because a big megacorp forced it to happen -- and even then those are backwards compatible with http1.1.
There have been efforts to modernise irc as well but IRC still isn’t even keeping pace, let alone catching up.
I think the easiest way to handle this is to actually just drop legacy and start again when you reach this point. It is infinitely easier to build your own solution from scratch than it is to move a mountain and convince an existing community and ecosystem to do what you think is best.
And matrix is proof this works. After trying it again this year, I think they have finally created a product which works really well.