[jdev] obtaining XMPP accounts

[Kevin Smith]

On 8 Dec 2015, at 21:01, Dave Cridland <dave at cridland.net> wrote:
> On 8 December 2015 at 20:53, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at stpeter.im> wrote:
> On 12/8/15 1:07 PM, Dave Cridland wrote:
> 
> Certainly I do have the feeling that as an
> end user, obtaining an XMPP account is now very hard, with the effective
> closure of end-user services from jabber.org <http://jabber.org> (the
> obvious go-to public server) and the dropping of XMPP by Google Talk -
> 
> I'm not sure I'd say "very hard" - there are still plenty of servers listed at xmpp.net. Could it be easier? Probably. It might be good to have a page about that at the new xmpp.org website.
> 
> By comparison to ${ARBITRARY_IM_SERVICE}, yes, I think it is very hard. Our on-boarding process is nothing like as easy as the somewhat commonplace "Download app, run app, do some registration dance" - instead it's "Download app, go to some website, go to some other website and try to figure out how to create an account, configure app."
> 
> It was better - for the user - when XEP-0077 was commonplace, since at least a client should ship with a list of servers. Of course, that level of simplicity brought its own problems, but I think we could make that process a lot smoother without compromising security entirely.

I think there’s a fair argument for simply having an advertised HTTPS endpoint for servers that clients could then present to the user. It’s not as satisfying to do it out of band, but it’s also very often what these easy-to-register-with apps do, and it’s somewhat richer than 77.

/K