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XMPP works – 1 July 2020

xmpp.org

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Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#51

Post by gsich »

jayd16 wrote: post #40
jcbrand wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running an XMPP server is much easier than running a mail server. I know, I've run both for a number of years. Very few people need clustering support.

My use cases were a large social app with chat and a AAA game with team chat. This was almost a decade ago but in both cases a single server was deemed insufficient by our ops people. I suppose you're right, though. I've never had to maintain a mail system of similar scale.

Mail is async in nature, XMPP has some expectancy to work as fast as possible (avoiding the term realtime here).

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#52

Post by MattJ100 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #47
MattJ100 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the gap Snikket[1] is aiming to fill. A preconfigured XMPP server that you can safely and easily run yourself (it's invite-based registration), with "blessed" apps provided for each platform that are guaranteed to be maintained to a common standard. It's early days and there's still some way to go, but the current release (server + Android client) is receiving excellent feedback from those using it. The next…

So you took Conversations, renamed them, and call it a day, focusing next on iOS? Then I've got rather bad news for you. You'll need to be focusing for a long, long time. It took us 'only' 2.5 years to build a good XMPP client for iOS (which we plan to release this month, finally), and while building it we had to break down XMPP down almost to a core and replace most of its components with better thought through solu…

Hi Andrew, I'm familiar with your team's work, and don't doubt your determination to build a quality product. From what I've seen, that appears to be your priority above and beyond XMPP, self-hosting, and interoperability with others in the ecosystem. There is nothing wrong with that choosing that as a primary goal, but it's a different goal to Snikket.

Snikket is building on and improving (pushing upstream whenever possible) existing projects in the ecosystem, not starting from scratch. The smooth invite-based onboarding flow for example originated from Snikket work, and is now upstream in Conversations and other clients are adopting it too.

I've been working with and on XMPP for 15 years, and have no illusions about the challenges we (or any fully open decentralized messaging system) face in today's world. However we can never give up on free, open and interoperable technologies.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#53

Post by randomchars »

the8472 wrote: post #45
GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

> 2. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push notifications? That's a problem with the iphone, not xmpp. Apple restricts what you can do with your hardware and offers no other options than their push notification approach. You cannot blame existing protocols for apple's distributed-software-hostile whims of the…

As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#54

Post by Macha »

icedchai wrote: post #16
jayd16 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at the time. At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work like that? I think X…

I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful. On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

> Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

Outside the United States, very few people were on it. When I signed up to play some video games with some US friends from a forum, I remember having to Google a valid US address and it's matching ZIP code as it wouldn't even let me sign up without one.

MSN was more popular in western Europe and as I understand it ICQ (eventually federated and shared some tech, but not the same network) was the top early IM in eastern Europe. Can't comment on the rest of the world at that time but I doubt the sign-up form was any more accepting of Korean addresses for example.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#55

Post by Joeri »

randomchars wrote: post #53
the8472 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push notifications? That's a problem with the iphone, not xmpp. Apple restricts what you can do with your hardware and offers no other options than their push notification approach. You cannot blame existing protocols for apple's distributed-software-hostile whims of the…

As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.

As an iphone user, I am not, and I am sure that apple could find a way to allow push notifications on the web without the battery taking a major hit.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#56

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

GuardLlama wrote: post #6

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse: 1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you…

I run my own ejabberd instance for a group of friends and it obviously works.

I do manual account creation and know people there (or they are vetted by my friends). The server federates with any other server that supports s2s encryption so they can talk to whoever they want.

On windows probably the most mature client is Gajim. You can use it on Linux too, but there are more alternatives (such as the more modern Dino.im) On Android there is the excellent Conversations, with a few more to choose from. Or you can go with a platform-independent web-based client and use Movim. All support OMEMO. I am not invested in the Apple ecosystem so I don't know about that (Beagle IM? Monal?).

Typically the XMPP naysaying is a mix of bad experiences in the past and NIH syndrome. Things like server-side message archiving, message carbons, message delivery receipts or MUCs are long solved. You want to make a stand for open, federated internet you need to put your money where your mouth is.

About the only sore points are cross-platform VoIP (Windows lacking here) and direct file transfers (SOCKS5 bytestreams are wonky which leaves http uploads) although arguably neither have to be a part of a chat application.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#57

Post by andrewshadura »

sacks2k wrote: post #20
rektide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?" Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient & the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.

"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it" I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately. I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem…

"We have reviewed the content you reported and found it doesn't go against our Community Standards."

This is the response I get 99% of times when I report blatant racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#58

Post by gpderetta »

Macha wrote: post #54
icedchai wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful. On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

> Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it. Outside the United States, very few people were on it. When I signed up to play some video games with some US friends from a forum, I remember having to Google a valid US address and it's matching ZIP code as it wouldn't even let me sign up without one. MSN was more popular in western Europe and as I understand it ICQ (eventually federated and shared some tech, but…

ICQ was also huge in Italy and, I understand, most of western Europe, at the turn of the millennium. Then MSN took over.

Imagine if the global phone network was balkanized like messaging networks...

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#59

Post by megous »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #41
gsich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By whom? The crowd on HN? Selfhosting email is obviously doable. Selfhosting does not imply residential IP.

It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit and with Google, Microsoft, &c it's impossible to get to anyone to resolve the issue once you know about it. Even for small companies this is a nightmare.

Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV.

And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either.

And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable.

As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered.

Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.

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