Convenience Is Not Enough (Bring Back XMPP Exports!)

The older I am and the more I see the demise of XMPP interoperability in various communication networks, the more reluctant I am to use a new shiny communicator. I’m tired of endless cycles of hype and demise of various networks and I no longer believe in network for “gamers”. Network for “everybody”. I don’t really care anymore.

ICQ was a good experience even if the network was proprietary and sometimes hostile to alternative clients. But we were locked in, because everybody used it and I didn’t know about Jabber back then.

I’m disappointed of Discord. It’s all the rage now. Many video game streamers or people playing video games use it or recommend. Many children and teenagers play games and at the same time create own chat worlds with various channels. Even groups on Facebook or people have their own Discord channels.

Ok, so I joined Emilia Hult Squad and Miyoki among many other channels, but it’s not really maintanable. No time for that kind of shit. Every world has like 20 channels and people write there. There is shitload of notifications. Client is quite good, but very heavy. Fine to run in Windows and for fun, but not for serious use in my eyes. Also it doesn’t federate with XMPP, is proprietary and walled garden, so I’m not interested using it. Another waste of my precious time. Also I use Steam which is enough.

Slack. The similar case. Electron-based client and is quite heavy. Aimed as communication platform for businesses. Had XMPP interface a few months ago, but not anymore. Hubris? Walled garded? We are too big now and invincible? Again, I will use it until I have to, but no more minute longer. Forget I’ll join some Slack workspace voluntarily and spend free time there. I like IRC and Jabber much more.

Facebook Messenger is another platform which had XMPP interoperability and I actually used it quite a lot. They turned it off 2015/04. They got too big.

While I get extreme capitalism requires and supports this behaviour and I totally understand it in this context. I just decided to draw boundaries somewhere. Why to waste our lives dealing with overhead of multitude of communication networks and in addition feel imprisoned in nearly each of them?

Why bother using them anyways? Why having my life so unnecessarily complex?

While I’m grateful to ICQ, Skype and other networks I think it’s time to fuck off.

(this was written some time ago - I still use skype, slack and whatapp. I left steam and discord.)