We don't need another federated network. Administrators of those nodes are putting themselves into danger. What we need to develop is a purely decentralized p2p network that is resistant to censorship and eavesdropping.
Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
151–160 of 169 posts
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right. I do share your concerns about performance, but I'm sure it will improve considerably. A few months ago on reddit, one of the Matrix core devs (ara4n) answered a question about how much they can improve performance:
"enormously. much of synapse's algorithms and DB schema are still unoptimised, plus python is not exactly renowned for being super-fast. we're effectively going through rewriting chunks of synapse - e.g. the new state storage representation in 0.18, and meanwhile Ruma is going through writing a cleanroom impl in Rust that should be a bajillion times faster :)"
(https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/56xzyo/matrix_is_a_n...)
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#153I 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.
> blown away by the good UI I can only imagine an engineer could see it this way. I found it rather confusing. I tried joining #debian and I kept getting "invitation" messages from some IRC bridge.
Reflecting a bit more, I think that if I stayed away from IRC it would have been less weird. Now I'm just wondering how the web client works. Do I trust my encryption to JavaScript?
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Wow, really? I'm so used to just buying SIM cards on street corners, I didn't realise some people had to go through documentation to get them. Also, in some countries like the US, you can buy 'burner' phones without any need for identification--no contract, no ID.
In Australia you need to show ID to get a SIM card, even just a $2 SIM from the grocery store.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#155What 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/
I am not sure, but that page doesn't talk about deliverability at all, as far as I can see. Is it generally true that spawning a mail server on a random cloud instance will work for deliverability? I would have assumed that any given cloud IP has a nonzero chance of having been used by a spammer in the past.
(Or, in other words, if this does work, why do people who have small- to medium-scale deliverability needs use a dedicated email-sending provider instead of just using a t2.nano running an AMI with Postfix?)
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#156Has anyone tried https://coy.im/ ?
The idea looks cool but not that they explicitly don't want to support OMEMO sticking with old OTR: https://github.com/twstrike/coyim/issues/233
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I said isn't just, meaning you need both.
XMPP was a tower built too tall and wide and it crumbled under its own optiomal extension weight.
Just bridges mean you are still selling your soul to a primary operator, which prevents trust.
Federation and bridges without extension hell means you can use whatever homeserver you want, bridge to whatever you need to, and finally have working interoperable IM.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> blown away by the good UI I can only imagine an engineer could see it this way. I found it rather confusing. I tried joining #debian and I kept getting "invitation" messages from some IRC bridge.
Reflecting a bit more, I think that if I stayed away from IRC it would have been less weird. Now I'm just wondering how the web client works. Do I trust my encryption to JavaScript?
And now after actually trying it out, photos and videos work pretty well. I can see this is a work in progress. So far so good, they just gotta hide all those public groups away somewhere. They could use a harsh critique from Moxie about real users I think.
Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?
#159Earlier 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).
How does it break down? The largest Matrix rooms we've seen have got ~50K users in them with very high traffic, and Synapse is good for at least 10 msgs/s currently (with orders of magnitude improvements on the horizon).
Try bridging a twitch chat into matrix, and you'll see message latency go up massively, and performance go down to be unusable.