When https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you?
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.
No, I don't have any problem about claiming interoperability in this context as it is completely orthogonal. You could also claim that not having animated gifs also makes it unusable for 99% of the population (an statement I might even agree with) and it would be irrelevant to interoperability.
iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" if anything most likely reduces your interoperability.
You should be realistic and consider that there is no point to any "E2EE" messaging solution on iOS as _by construction_ all the metadata (at the very least) is going to be leaked to Apple (and they in turn will leak that to the authorities, as was pointed in HN quite recently), precisely by the push notifications crap you'd be forced to adopt as part of the pants lowering requiered to support iOS.
> iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms"
We can be here grandstanding and dismissing other people's choices or we can be pragmatic and find ways to grow the alternative networks to the point where the "mainstream" can no longer ignore it.
If you want to continue using XMPP, great. But those that are on Apple are not going to drop their beloved iDevices just because we are telling them how cool XMPP is. Your inflexibility will do nothing but keep you isolated and able to talk with a handful of other people that are stubborn as you. However, if you let yourself accept that encouraging other people to adopt Matrix will at the same time (a) bring progress to those on iOS and (b) increase the utility of your own XMPP server, as now there will be more people being able to reach you through a bridge.
> We can be here grandstanding and dismissing other people's choices or we can be pragmatic and find ways to grow the alternative networks to the point where the "mainstream" can no longer ignore it.
I have been trying the pragmatic way for over 30 years and it. simply. doesn't. work. The mainstream will drop privacy, federation, and anything in a heartbeat just because the new network comes with a client which can do animated GIFs. There's simply no way to continuously try to match the race of ever-diminishing-usefulness features and if you even try to point that then someone calls you "dismissive and grandstanding".
The only (possible) way forward is legislation. Carrots do not work.
> The mainstream will drop privacy, federation, and anything in a heartbeat just because the new network comes with a client which can do animated GIFs.
ICQ had animated gifs. MSN had animated gifs. Viber has animated gifs. Telegram has animated gifs.
Why shouldn't people expect animated gifs from any decent messenger? Who are we to police what people should prefer for such a crucial piece of technology?
At best it can be described as a "hacker's idea of a functional mobile app". The UI is crude, antiquated and not at all following the Apple guidelines.
I'm not saying that I can do better, but I can bet that if you show it to 100 iphone users, 98% would not be interested in having it as their main messenger app.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.