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Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

dino.im

11–20 of 153 posts

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#11

Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed. XMPP, like email, is not a 'decentralized' protocol, but a federated one. If you and your chat partners use the same server, it would be as centralized as WhatsApp or Signal.

I think you are confusing terms here, what you mean is distributed, which is only a subset of decentralized. Federated is also decentralized. See for example https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...

Beside that, Dino does support peer-to-peer file transfers using Jingle.

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#13

Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed. XMPP, like email, is not a 'decentralized' protocol, but a federated one. If you and your chat partners use the same server, it would be as centralized as WhatsApp or Signal.

Federated protocols are decentralized, though; there's no central point of control. This graphic has been done to death at this point but it's relevant here: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/c...

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#15

Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed. XMPP, like email, is not a 'decentralized' protocol, but a federated one. If you and your chat partners use the same server, it would be as centralized as WhatsApp or Signal.

> Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed.

It is decentralized in theory (no one server controls the network), but 'federated' is the correct word to use here.

When I saw the title I was assuming this was some cool new sort of client that created and managed a bunch of logins/identities as one on various XMPP servers and used something like OMEMO for key management on top of that 'layer'.

Tox is a better example of a 'decentralized' protocol.

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#16
Does this finally get away from the problem that XMPP had in the old days, where the usage model was tightly bound to the domain model, so each domain would have one and only one XMPP server (plus possibly a fallback) and if you aren't the domain administrator then you can pound sand?

It was pretty much impossible to run your own server for fun unless you registered a domain or two because of the serious business logic baked into the design of the protocol.

Ages ago when I was working on a replacement for IRC for an organization that needed to decentralize its servers because they had a lot of users spread across the world behind iffy internet uplinks but all on the same domain this was a huge headache. The old IRC system worked really well for them, but some of the higher ups were upset because it wasn't "enterprise quality" and thus shouldn't be on their network.

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#17
post #5
post #4

I'm using Dino daily and it works well and looks modern. It still has minor issues here and there but it's finally a desktop client I can recommend to my non-technical friends. One question though: is Windows version planned?

Planned as in wanted: yes. Planned as in having it as a roadmap item: no, there is no roadmap :) It's definitely something that is now becoming more relevant after the first release.

I'm not a linux hater, but as long as it's in linux-land, there won't be much mass adoption. Not necessarily a bad thing, but might as well named it YAXC and tossed it into the list[0] (oh turns out Dino is on the list and there's already something called YAXIM)

[0]https://xmpp.org/software/clients.html

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#18
Is this a client or is Dino also running a chat server/issuing accounts etc? I used to use pidgin/adium/finch back when google & facebook supported XMPP, but I'm not sure what I'd do with a client now.

Crucially: If I have Dino, can I chat with any of my friends? Or do I need to persuade them to install Dino & create an account somewhere first?

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#19

Does this finally get away from the problem that XMPP had in the old days, where the usage model was tightly bound to the domain model, so each domain would have one and only one XMPP server (plus possibly a fallback) and if you aren't the domain administrator then you can pound sand? It was pretty much impossible to run your own server for fun unless you registered a domain or two because of the serious business log…

That sounds like a server design problem, not a client problem. XMPP is stateful, so it is harder to have a distributed server but it's also doing something more complicated than eg. serving a document like HTTP. If you use a server like ejabberd and a proxy layer you can easily do geographic distribution of the server, or at least, with no more difficulty than any other protocol.

Re: Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

#20
post #10

Does this support offline messages and a history shared between devices? Lack of these features in XMPP was why my company moved to slack.

These are both supported by XMPP and are wide spread among servers. They are also supported by Dino.
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