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Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

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Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#131

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

Bridging is the problematic issue that gave birth to federation, so I'm pretty sure you're mistaken here.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#132

Post by bigbugbag »

geofft wrote: post #77

What federated / decentralized protocols have been actual successes? For what protocols can I set up my own server in my house or in some cloud service, and have a comparable experience to using a major provider's service (modulo scalability and personal sysadmin effort)? I'm worried that the only ones seem to be email and the web, both of which came into existence when the internet was small and academic and it was…

> running email on your own is getting increasingly hard because of spam and IP reputation.

Are you sure ? https://mailinabox.email/

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#133

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

rjeli wrote: post #115
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?

Yes, but there is no way to verify fingerprints, so trust is still very much client/server based.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#134

Post by bigbugbag »

Markoff wrote: post #33
FabHK wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

particularly with the network effect. It gets tiring to convince people to install Signal, Wire, etc.

argument to install Signal is pretty easy - I just ask Android users if they use Facebook Messenger to manage SMS. if answer is negative I propose why not use different nice SMS client called Signal which can also do encrypted online instant messaging though many people are just too lazy to replace even ugly default Messaging app, so wet just use it with my wife and parents since I boycott Messenger/Whatsapp, just in…

That argument would not hold if someone knowledgeable is in the room as the same time[1]. Silence[2] would be the fork that actually does encrypted SMS and took it when Signal dropped it.

Why give away your SMS to a messaging app that purposely dropped their encryption to focus on online chat which is useless to me as I don't have a data plan?

[1]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/ [2]: https://silence.im/

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#135

Post by erlend_sh »

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?

Think of it as a crowd cheering. You can't make out any single voice, but there's a coherency to the noise. In the same way, mass-chats conform around smileys and memes in response to whatever the crowd is viewing together.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#136

Post by cyborgx7 »

bigbugbag wrote: post #119
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/

This looks great. I've often thought the biggest issue holding back xmpp adoption is the lack of web clients. I'm convinced e-mail would be dead if it wasn't for webmail clients. People will eventually graduate to a native client that suits their needs but finding a client and installing it as well as finding a xmpp service provider is a much bigger initial hurdle than just trying out xmpp because a friend recommended you a service. I've been thinking about hosting my own xmpp server and I will definitely keep this project in mind if I ever make accounts for friends.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#137

Post by cyborgx7 »

bluesign wrote: post #57
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email exists. When Slack is bought by Google and merged with Hangouts, and WhatsApp changes over to a new all-messages-delivered-by-the-NSA protocol, email will still exist.

Email survived because it is adopted as main identity provider, similar for SMS

I've recently been thinking about xmpp making for a great federated identity provider for multiplayer video games. With communication already built in, initialization of peer-to-peer sessions already a common use-case, and the right XEPs it could replace centralized services like steamworks, psn or xbox-live.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#138

Post by digi_owl »

middleclick wrote: post #114
ge0rg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For a number of years in Norway it used to be the case that you didn't need to show any ID or similar when buying a prepaid sim. Thus it was popular among criminals, and the related scratch cards circulated as virtually as cash. The police raised a stink about this situation, and soon enough you need ID to get them.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#139

Post by rakoo »

niftich wrote: post #108
SamWhited wrote: post #103

I think the real issue here is that too many people conflate XMPP the protocol with the various XMPP based services (most of the smaller free public services do this). If we tell people to "go sign up for an XMPP account" it's obviously going to be too complicated; they're going to search, find the XSF websites or a bunch of random libraries and protocol information, and give up. Meanwhile, companies can use XMPP and…

Didn't OpenID have this exact same problem? Interestingly, email didn't, despite acronyms like POP3, IMAP, SMTP being a frequent occurrence once you try to supply an email client of your choice. So what was different about email, once internet users started escaping the walled gardens of old?

Users were all registered by default to an email account at their ISP. All of them could send emails back and forth to people inside and outside their ISP. When they started to suck, they registered new addresses on specialized email providers, and they kept their contact list with them, so emails could still be used. Because emails was pretty much the first way of communicating and because of how common it is it won't disappear soon.
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