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Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

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Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#81

Post by F3nd0 »

upofadown wrote: post #73
troupo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works. No. It doesn't "just work". It very much depends on which subset of the XEPs all the parties in the chain support. > All other popular systems and servers went defunct; Well, in this sense it does just work :)

You can always send and receive messages no matter what XEPs are supported. Not that that is a problem in practice. There is a fairly well established subset of XEPs that everyone supports. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html https://compliance.conversations.im/

Unless you want to encrypt said messages. But I guess insecure communication beats no communication at all. (I also never had much luck with voice and video calls using XMPP.)

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#82

Post by F3nd0 »

pavo-etc wrote: post #61
writtenone wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Any good Android clients? "Conversations" seems to be the best and it's nowhere near the polish of Signal & Co. crashes often, UX is clunky, family will never stick with it.

I ran into this exact problem. I needed to fork Conversations to add a lot of polish. My fork is definitely improved but still has a few rough edges I'm chipping away at.

Do you plan on contributing your improvements upstream, or is that not feasible for some reason?

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#83

Post by pavo-etc »

dhc02 wrote: post #75
pavo-etc wrote: post #60

I have recently picked up XMPP as my agent communication layer, and its worked great. Each pi agent is given an account and wrapped in an XMPP client[0] that lets it speak to me and other agents when needed. This has worked well since I can spin up new accounts on demand and I can use existing server software (ejabberd, perfect) and clients (Fluux, great; Conversations, okay). I've had to make a few custom modificati…

This is really neat. I've recently been watching people use custom pi harnesses and thinking of jumping in, but I was dreaming of a way to do essentially what pi-msg does so that I could drive it remotely in a more full-featured way. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks! I had the same urge, I didn't want to be responsible for an entire GUI and communication layer but I did want to have a remotely controllable extensible harness, this was the perfect middle ground.

The benefit beyond that was having agents running on my server directly so they can do a lot of sysadmin and monitoring tasks, as well as suggesting config changes through PRs to my nix config.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#84

Post by dhc02 »

pavo-etc wrote: post #83
dhc02 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really neat. I've recently been watching people use custom pi harnesses and thinking of jumping in, but I was dreaming of a way to do essentially what pi-msg does so that I could drive it remotely in a more full-featured way. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks! I had the same urge, I didn't want to be responsible for an entire GUI and communication layer but I did want to have a remotely controllable extensible harness, this was the perfect middle ground. The benefit beyond that was having agents running on my server directly so they can do a lot of sysadmin and monitoring tasks, as well as suggesting config changes through PRs to my nix config.

Letting the agents bang their heads against the wall hunting down a config fix for a random malfunctioning piece of my homelab instead of me is by far my favorite part of the AI present.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#86

Post by ValdikSS »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #46
fishgoesblub wrote: post #21

I love XMPP and am hopeful for its future with what the teams behind Movim[0], and Fluux[1] are doing. It was a tremendous shame that Matrix didn't improve upon XMPP and instead did their own thing. I continuously wonder what would the XMPP ecosystem look like, if the millions of dollars of funding Matrix initially had (what a waste) went to XMPP instead? [0]: https://movim.eu/ [1]: https://github.com/processone/fluu…

It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports

Daniel (the author of the linked article) was one of the people to define profiles for human chatting: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#87

Post by ValdikSS »

shadowgovt wrote: post #69
PunchyHamster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you want it to work? You should have installed the 'it actually works' modules." Working with XMPP gave me a whole new appreciation for why people keep inventing their own chat protocols. I don't think this is an unsalvageable situation, but the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.

XEP-0479: XMPP Compliance Suites 2023

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#88

Post by opan »

shadowgovt wrote: post #70
neilalexander wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.

Unfortunately, some of the features that can degrade are things like "the chat is actually secure."

I strongly prefer that with XMPP I can disable the encryption when it breaks to tell my friend I'm trapped under a boulder and bleeding out. With Matrix our chat is encrypted, I can't turn it off ever, if it stops working I can't communicate, my only option is to make a new room with encryption disabled and invite my friend hoping he sees the invite and accepts in time.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#89

Post by opan »

zaik wrote: post #48
PunchyHamster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports

> mess of what server/client supports If you allow for independent implementations of the protocol this will always happen. Also, inventing another non-standard protocol creates even more incompatibility between clients and servers.

IRC and email worked out pretty well I think.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#90

Post by opan »

tcfhgj wrote: post #57
vcccgjuf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is nearly as old today as XMPP was when the Matrix project was started, and Matrix is still such a pile of shit standard that there's STILL only one server implementation and one client. That's actually not how the standard was designed; if Matrix had been a successful project, according to their own goals, the ecosystem would look a lot more like XMPP than it does. Comparing XMPP at 11 years old to Matrix tod…

Actually, Matrix has a series of server and client implementations. Servers: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/ Clients: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ Also, imho Matrix is a better standard than xmpp, because of what PunchHamster said and the better feature set. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion :)

I think GP was speaking hyperbolically, because most new features hit Element/Synapse first and other clients lag behind implementing them. If you care about more than the basics working, it's kind of just the illusion of choice.
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