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Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

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Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#111

Post by panic »

ge0rg wrote: post #107
panic wrote: post #90

The fundamental problem with decentralized messaging these days is push notifications. Apple, at least, makes it very hard for you to deliver APNS notifications without running a centralized server. XMPP and IRC will never work as well as a centralized service until the notification architecture changes.

Actually, XMPP has a solution for that for a year now [0]. The principal idea is that a client developer runs a push proxy component that forwards XMPP push events to GCM / APNS / whatever. The client tells its server which push component should be contacted and disconnects. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html

These proxy components have many of the same problems as centralized servers. If the proxy component goes down, your client stops working. You can't just download any random client and have it work forever. You have to trust that the developer won't shut it down. Paying the developer can give you this trust (see IRCCloud), but most people aren't willing to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#112

Post by nine_k »

tehabe wrote: post #92
woliveirajr wrote: post #4

> A single decision by Moxie or a single court order in some country can make Signal unavailable to a large part of its user base. This is a great point made later on the thread. And already happened in some countries, for example, with whatsapp. Social pressure was big enough to revert it in a reasonable time, but time is very relative on how much you or your business relies on it.

But even if Moxie does something weird or some country breaks Signal. You and your contacts can easier switch to another system. While when your XMPP server admin does something weird or a country breaks it you are locked in. For Signal you use an ID which is not owned by Signal. So for Signal and alike the decentralisation doesn't come from the service but from your own social graph which is your phone book on your…

Is mobile number portability a thing in every country?

I suspect that relying on IDs owned by another system can have its drawbacks. Maybe it's not likely that an entire country is forced to change phone numbers. It's still possible to lose a number for various reasons (most entirely benign). An oppressive government could definitely disrupt communication of suspects by forcing the phone company(-ies) to terminate their contracts and unlist their numbers.

(But IDs being piggy-backed to a different system which is not easily disrupted on a mass scale does have some advantages, too.)

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#113

Post by pjtr »

zanny wrote: post #98
upofadown wrote: post #64

The real issue is federated IM vs non-federated IM. Anyone can make a IM system work off a single server. People do it all the time and we have had a series of incompatible IM systems in the past. Signal and Whatsapp are just the current flavours. Soon they will be gone and there will be new hotness. At this point I consider any non-federating IM system to be part of the problem. As mentioned by someone in the linked…

I'd argue the future isn't just federation but bridging. We have already seen repeated attempts on the client side to abstract IM platform - Pidgin being the largest, but a ton of effort was invested into the Telepathy framework for about a decade. The adoption rates show a general failure of the model. Server-side transparent interoperability like Riot has with several services, however, seems extremely promising as…

How does it differ from XMPP server-to-server gateways?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#114

Post by middleclick »

ge0rg wrote: post #38
hackuser wrote: post #29

These would be my concerns about potential differences between Signal and an 'Easy XMPP' client; would someone who knows Signal say whether these are accurate?: * Signal users are not anonymous; Signal requires users' phone numbers. * Signal is centralized. Is there a way to run your own Signal server? * Signal uses Google Chrome on the desktop (and Android?) and Google Play Services (or some part of them) on Android…

Signal requires users' phone numbers. True for Signal. XMPP is using JIDs which are functionally comparable to email addresses, and similarly anonymous (or not). Is there a way to run your own Signal server? The Signal client is open source, the server mostly so. You could create your own semi-Signal community, but it would not be able to talk to official-Signal users. XMPP is designed for federation by default, and…

Phone numbers are not always anonymous. In India and I am sure some other countries as well, you have to give a photograph and a government ID to get a SIM card. And that is why I am hesitant to use Signal: I want to talk to you but I am not sure if I should give you my number?

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#115

Post by rjeli »

rvern wrote: post #106

People who care more about convenience than freedom and privacy can and do use Skype, iMessage, and Snapchat. If you give up freedom and privacy to make a more convenient client, you're not improving the freedom and privacy situation, you're just making more of the miserable proprietary software that we're trying to get away from. If it's not free software, you have neither freedom nor privacy. If it's not decentrali…

I was under the impression iMessage has end-to-end encryption?

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#116

Post by spin »

truftruf wrote: post #58

Signal is a centralized point of failure and surveillance. Why can't I run my own signal server? Why doesn't the client support this? We need something like Signal that that isn't under the control of a single party.

Awhile ago I built a little hack that allows you to run your own Signal server:

https://github.com/mfassler/pySignald

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#117

Post by bigbugbag »

digi_owl wrote: post #19
ge0rg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are attempts at creating an XMPP compliance suite[0], but the biggest problem is actually a lack of volunteers / money to improve the clients and servers. Conversations is driven by one full time developer, most other applications are hobby projects. [0] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0375.html

It was a real sad day when Facebook and Google decided that proprietary was the way to go...

Afaik facebook was designed to be a closed walled garden from the get go and never offered interoperability despite using xmpp at first.

Google gtalk predates facebook and happened at different times, IIRC the change to a closed chat service was a reaction due to facebook abusing the openness to scrape contacts.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#118

Post by kuschku »

rhblake wrote: post #84
kuschku wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).

I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/…

Quakenet frequently reaches 8-11k users multiple times a year, for example in #eurovision during the song contest, or in #election last november.

Other networks have similar events.

And yes, most of the problems I describe only appear on Twitch, or other livestream chats.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#119

Post by bigbugbag »

0XAFFE wrote: post #36

I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff. It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere. EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.

Have you tried XMPP's client kaiwa ?

http://getkaiwa.com/

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#120

Post by kuschku »

riquito wrote: post #78
kuschku wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).

I'm ignorant on the subject, how can hundred/thousands messages per minute be a real use case? I would expect such massive amount to be parsed by robots, not humans, and in that case why use IRC at all instead of a queue system like RabbitMQ? Maybe because it's easier to share an IRC channel than an open queue?

Well, take QuakeNet's #eurovision during the ESC. Tenthousand users, all spamming as fast as they can type.

If that is a meaningful discussion is another topic, but many chats for live evenys, especially on Twitch, have these numbers of users and messages.

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