Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

COI – Chat Over IMAP

coi-dev.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 259 posts

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#181

Post by rafbuff »

jokoon wrote: post #156

Doesn't this bring a large overhead since you're sending a ton of header stuff for each short message? It's true that email is really the number 1 mean of communication, but I wonder if it's not ton and ton of added layers to make it modern enough. And as it was mentioned, I'm not sure email is really good enough for mobile and other constrained bandwidth. I might be wrong, but email headers are pretty scary. In the…

We thought of that a lot. But like our other baby, http://id4me.org - where we chose use use DNS and OpenID and mesh it into a federated identity protocol - email infrastructure is simply there, it's federated, robust, run by millions of servers, large and small, tested, filtered, pounded, drowned, abused you-name-it. That buys some extra overhead.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#182

Post by feanaro »

alrs wrote: post #63
Arathorn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'har…

I tried Matrix last month. It's neat, but slow and a little buggy. Recommending it to anyone other than a Matrix developer right now seems a bit of a stretch.

To counterbalance this a bit, I'm using it heavily with a large group of (partially non-technical) friends and friends-of-friends, along with participating in public rooms over federation and it's been pretty smooth. Things were certainly rougher a year ago but they have improved a great deal and are continuing to improve at a good pace.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#183

Post by javajosh »

smush wrote: post #115

So due to HN cross-pollination, I'm now using Delta.Chat on my android which works a treat. Hopefully once COI has a client, I can try that one out as well; if its android client supports multiple email accounts per install (unlike Delta.chat at the moment), it will almost certainly make its way into normal app rotation and evangelizing BBM/WA/Messages users to a more private, secure instant message client.

Interestingly COI is based on deta.chat, as per this comment in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216346

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#184

Post by tlynchpin »

e1ven wrote: post #121
the_librarian wrote: post #118

Hey everyone. I don't want to start a debate or anything, I'm just looking for a privacy concerned chat service that I can easily teach my fiance to sign up for and use. She gave up on Pidgin, and I would appreciate any pros/cons for your favorite service of this kind. Thank you in advance!

Signal is probably the best combination of easy-to-use/secure.

Signal doesn't support vcard which makes it a non-starter for many people [0][1].

[0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/6520#issu... [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/6520#issu...

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#185

Post by Piskvorrr »

supermatt wrote: post #26
Piskvorrr wrote: post #7

What of network effect? And in today's fragmented, firewalled and NATed internet, what of ! --dport 80,443 -j DROP?

it works over regular smtp and imap, via your usual relays and email servers, etc. If you can send and receive email, then I guess it should work fine.

If you can send and receive email, then I guess you have been bitten at least once by its store-and-forward, best-effort nature. In other words, no guarantees on message delivery time (two days delayed? Working as designed!), message ordering, or even whether it's delivered at all. I literally know of no worse medium for chat than email, even considering raw ethernet frames and pigeon post.

"It is sort of available everywhere" is email's only selling point - that's not enough to justify "let's build everything on top of it".

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#186

Post by fock »

Arathorn wrote: post #174
SamWhited wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matrix is an entirely different type of technology to IRC or XMPP. It's more similar to NNTP or Git than either IRC or XMPP. What does this have to do with anything? It's used for chat and solves all the same problems. You could easily have done all the same things (including building a system that does syncing like matrix nodes) on top of an existing protocol instead of reinventing the wheel.

We seem to have this same dead-end conversation every few months, so indulge me as I try to break the impasse with a story instead. When I was about 13, I worked on a really fun chat system at school called (wait for it) iNFERNO][ (it was the second attempt at a chat system called iNFERNO). It was pretty awesome, and worked like this: the school ran a large network of 68k-based Macs (LCs, Centrises, even a Quadra) ne…

+1 and arguably the concurrent clients + multiuser thing is something which XMPP did never get around really. There are at least a dozen or so XEPs which noone is implementing (except for Conversations) which make basic functionality a mess. You download any client and get basic 1on1-chat with no missed messages when both parties are online. Everything else depends on, .... whatever. Even major providers needed some years to get around this (look at Whatsapp). So I think it's really not reinventing the wheel if one tries to implement something anew learning from the pasts mistakes

(if you are affiliated with riot/matrix: keep up the good work!)

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#187

Post by fock »

petre wrote: post #165
zinid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) Recognized by whom? The XSF has standardized their core in IETF. Is there something similar for Matrix.org Foundation? > trying to solve existing problems using new approaches is how things evolve. What new approaches? You're just recreating federated IM network using different wire format. How on earth is it innova…

Except XMPP already has several mature client and server implementations since it was around for longer.

So I want: - multiuser chat (persistent) - voice-calls (let's have them 1on1) - file-transfer - concurrent clients

Which mature clients and servers should I choose from, implementing all this (basic) stuff?

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#188

Post by acct1771 »

cvwright wrote: post #166
ppjet6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeremie Miller, 1999: > "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems(ICQ, AIM, etc). Matthew Hodgson, 2019: > I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince eve…

If everyone shared your (lack of) optimism, then we'd still be stuck with: * Wonky unwieldy hypertext systems instead of the WWW * The Nomad instead of the iPod * The Blackberry instead of the iPhone * GNU Hurd instead of Linux * Geocities instead of Facebook (-- OK maybe that one's a wash :-) The point is, sometimes it's worth trying again until you can make it work.

It will work this time.

We don't have much choice!

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#190

Post by jjrh »

fock wrote: post #186
Arathorn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seem to have this same dead-end conversation every few months, so indulge me as I try to break the impasse with a story instead. When I was about 13, I worked on a really fun chat system at school called (wait for it) iNFERNO][ (it was the second attempt at a chat system called iNFERNO). It was pretty awesome, and worked like this: the school ran a large network of 68k-based Macs (LCs, Centrises, even a Quadra) ne…

+1 and arguably the concurrent clients + multiuser thing is something which XMPP did never get around really. There are at least a dozen or so XEPs which noone is implementing (except for Conversations) which make basic functionality a mess. You download any client and get basic 1on1-chat with no missed messages when both parties are online. Everything else depends on, .... whatever. Even major providers needed some…

What do you mean? Unless you're using a very old client like pidgin, this stuff shouldn't be a problem.
Post reply on HN