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Daniel Gultsch
Personal blog · gultsch.desecurityprogrammingpolitics
Daniel Gultsch's personal blog at gultsch.de covers security, programming and politics. Since 2016, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 75 times, most often “An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-24, and you can follow it by feed.
I’ve been a freelance software developer for over 15 years. My main interests lie in open standards and communication protocols, including instant messaging, email, and the fediverse. I’m the project lead for Conversations and Ltt.rs. Occasionally, I also dabble in security research and regularly sp
Most-linked posts?
- An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’16 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2016-11-30
- The State of Mobile XMPP in 201611 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2016-06-02
- Conversations v1.15.0 released with new trust/verification concept7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-11-30
- /compliance_ranked.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-11-05
- Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-09-24
- Why it took two years to enable E2EE by default in Conversations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-13
What Hacker News says?
You might be interested in the refutation of some of those arguments by Daniel Gultsch: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Comment linking /objection.html
on “My First Impressions of Web3”Submitted Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free as a story · 709 points
HN discussionFor completeness a counterpoint from one of prominent XMPP developers: An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Comment linking /objection.html
on “Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention”Submitted Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence as a story · 272 points
HN discussionAnd here is the response to that https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Comment linking /objection.html
on “Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways”Submitted The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016 as a story · 114 points
HN discussionI wouldn't subscribe to the "15 years ago" statement, but we have figured out mobile battery use pretty well, and the respective solutions are avialable in both server and client implementations. Have a look at [0] and [1] for (slightly biased but more detailed) elabortations. simply declaring it a myth is, I suspect, unlikely to convince remaining skeptics It's hard to provide specific counter-arguments to anecdota…
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada”Submitted Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction? as a story · 98 points
HN discussionXMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging. There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file…
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?”Submitted The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016 as a story · 18 points
HN discussionWell, if the server and the client support the required extensions the battery impact is very low: https://conversations.im/#optimizations Those extensions are pretty standard stuff nowadays. Here you can find an explanation with a few more details (section "Battery drain"): https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “WhatsApp told to stop sharing user data with Facebook by French authorities”Submitted An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’ as a story · 17 points
HN discussionIRCv3 has the same problems as XMPP's XEPs [1]. You need servers capable of handling these standards, and then you need clients capable of handling these standards. In the meantime people will chose other platforms that provide better and more consistent experiences. [1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “Slack's bait and switch”Submitted Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free as a story · 13 points
HN discussionIIRC, the main criticism was against federation, and not XMPP itself. Daniel Gultsch, the author Conversations (XMPP Android App), wrote a response: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Comment linking /objection.html
on “Slack's bait and switch”Submitted Conversations v1.15.0 released with new trust/verification concept as a story · 11 points
HN discussionActually, I think it is wrong to call it TOFU as it simply doesn't require the user to opt-in to anything. Instead, it seems more like the thing the XMPP people call 'blind trust before verification' [1]. I am not quite sure if it is exactly the same as 'blind trust before verification' changes its behavior as soon as you explicitly verified the keys. That way everybody can use somehow e2e encrypted messages, but if…
Comment linking /trust.html
on “Keybase is not softer than TOFU”Submitted Sending Jabber/XMPP Messages via HTTP as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFunny you should mention Zoom, which just like Whatsapp is pretty much a half-baked proprietary XMPP implementation. Now if we had proper interop regulations mandating interoperability between commercial entities (no need to apply that to hobby/research projects), we could talk between all these networks. Sure it would take a few months of serious dedication for these chat vendors to write specifications for the pro…
Comment linking /objection.html
on “EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices”Submitted Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe claim that XMPP on mobile can only result in lots of bandwith and battery usage is false, according to Daniel Gultsch, developer of the Android XMPP client conversations: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html Money quote: “XMPP is not suited for mobile devices. That’s a myth that has been around for ages. It is mostly spread by people who want to sell you their own proprietary instant messaging solution.” From my ow…
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “Writing a video chat application from the ground up, part 1”Submitted Why it took two years to enable E2EE by default in Conversations as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer they prefer standards and protocols that work well in the smartphone era. As late as 2016 XMPP had next to zero support for features expected in a mobile-first world: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html . Most XEPs in the article were at experimental stage or draft at the time, and are still in the same status nearly three years later. Som…
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “Tim Berners-Lee: 'Stop web's downward plunge to dysfunctional future'”Submitted OMEMO slides (Signal protocol for Jabber/XMPP) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI still use XMPP to connect to google talk and converse with people who are using hangouts. I use "Conversations" on Android, which works well and also supports OMEMO (the XMPP version of the encryption behind Signal/Whatsapp/etc). I'm effectively doing the equivalent of your facebook+xmpp+otr setup today, but it's googlechat+xmpp+omemo. The author of Conversations recently wrote up the state of XMPP in 2016: https:…
Comment linking /xmpp_2016.html
on “Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger”Submitted Blind Trust Before Verification as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe maintainer of the "Conversations" XMPP client wrote an interesting response to that article: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Comment linking /objection.html
on “Encrypted email is still a pain”Submitted Blind Trust Before Verification (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMoxie Marlinspike, of Open Whisper Systems, had some pretty pessimistic things to say about how stagnant federated protocols become, and why they avoided that approach with Signal. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ End result: Signal is a real, usable tool, the recommendation of which is fully actionable security and privacy advice you can share with anyone who is capable of using WhatsApp. Here's som…
Comment linking /objection.html
on “Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook”Submitted A pathway to a well regulated instant messaging market as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
