[Opensim-dev] Groups and using our sims more

[Kyle Hamilton]

IRC is inefficient, unauthenticated, easy to break (brittle, and thus
not 'reliable' the way anyone would normally use the term), requires
one-and-only-one path from server to server (and thus from client to
client), and is thus subject to "netsplits", grants too much power to
any individual server, grants too much power to the operators of each
individual server, grants too much power to the Operators of the
entire network, and all of its shortcomings were addressed in XMPP.
It is also a much, much different protocol nowadays than the original
RFC on it.

Further, IRC also does not scale to thousands of users in a single
room.  (If you have more than 50 users in a room, the join/part
notifications easily eat up most of the communications bandwidth, and
the messages must travel along the 'backbone' server path.)

As well, using XMPP for individual messaging and IRC for group
messaging requires the implementation of and maintenance of two
separate communications protocols.

I'd rather IRC just /die/.  Since it won't, in second place I'd rather
not build new things atop it.

-1 to IRC.

-Kyle H

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 8:32 PM, Buckaroo Mu <opensim-dev at bitparts.org> wrote:
> I'd have to put a big -1 on using XMPP for group chat. While XMPP is
> fantastic for user-to-user chat, and for small groups, it just does not
> scale to thousands of users in a single room. Let me give you my take.
>
> I highly support using XMPP for IM. Each grid could have a single XMPP
> server to provide user-to-user and user-to-group-of-friends messaging -
> multi-person chat never gets larger than a few dozen at max, XMPP could
> handle this. It also, if worked properly, could allow for very easy
> out-of-world IM support - by providing the appropriate wrappers, and
> feeding credentials to the XMPP server, any XMPP-compatible client could
> load friends' list and provide chat. Links between XMPP servers also
> allow for hypergrid IMs.
>
> For groups, though, I think IRC is definitely the way to go. Granted, we
> would need to wrap this in OpenSim code to allow for "room"/group
> authorization, notification, roles, etc - however, IRC is reliable and
> demonstrated to work for groups of thousands. Again, each grid runs an
> IRC server, and inter-server links allow for hypergrid group chats.
> Perhaps (this is a big perhaps, I've never dug into the details) OpenSim
> could provide some sort of ident server to assist authentication.
>
> Discuss :>
>
> Mike Mazur wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Kyle Hamilton <aerowolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> why can't we implement XMPP's group, messaging, and presence
>>> notifications?  It might break backward compatibility with the current
>>> MessageServer, but it seems to be essentially already a solved
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> XMPP also has the added benefit that anyone can be a server on the
>>> XMPP network.
>>>
>>
>> I second this. From what I understand, XMPP is optimized to deliver
>> small snippets of information, any information, to many concurrent
>> users effectively.
>>
>> Looking forward I see a distributed model (HyperGrid) for virtual
>> worlds, so the messaging system should also be distributed. I believe
>> XMPP's got that solved with its decentralized servers.
>>
>> Isn't there already some XMPP module sitting in our source tree?
>>
>> Mike
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>>
>>
>
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