[...]
There is the hypothesis that any federated network tends to
cluster around a number of large nodes. E.g. for XMPP this would be
gmail, jabber.org, jabber.ccc.de (applause to their efforts on
making themselves unreliable!), ...
This is true even of unfederated networks (Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Skype, the current crop of cool new mobile chat apps). My
hypothesis: human beings are herd animals and prefer to flock together
in large numbers. "Are you on hot-new-service-X?" It's much easier to
think and act that way than to strike out on your own.
Right. The benefit of federation is that _I_ can ignore the herd to some
degree.
Interdomain federation is hard, especially delivering the same
user experience as between users on the same domain.
This is a huge factor. It's much easier to offer a consistent and
quality experience if you control both ends of the pipe
Yeah, http://vimeo.com/77257232 talks about that -- and the lack of open
products.
I do think that webrtc gives us a good chance to move the baseline
experience from basic IM + presence to rich federation. And heck, we've
got some movement here ;-)
What amuses me most about webrtc is that "rich media chat" was listed as
#6 of the six oldest ideas in chat @
http://antecipate.blogspot.de/2006/11/six-oldest-new-ideas-in-chat.html
and "in-browser chat" is #2
Most people always complain about
how there's no great email client, no great IRC client, no great
Jabber client, and so on (don't even get me started on SIP clients!)
- -- with plenty of justification.
See above, as you say it's not limited to XMPP. It's a more general lack
of accepting non-developer roles in opensource.
Peter: I really appreciate that you enjoy writing specifications!
