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Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

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Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#111

Post by goffi »

F3nd0 wrote: post #80
justsomehnguy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works. Except no. You can't even have a conversation between Conversations and Fluux because OMEMO is enabled by default in Conversations and there is just no OMEMO support in Fluux - despite it being actually modern one. Gajim works but Pidgin doesn't even show "I sent you an OMEMO encrypted message but your client doesn’t seem to support that". Just like images, which is a f…

And of course most XMPP clients which support OMEMO only support an old version of it, which is incompatible with the new OMEMO version, currently only supported by KDE’s own client—Kaidan. That also happens to be the only desktop client I feel like I’d actually enjoy using (if only I could use it to talk with people not using Kaidan).

Libervia (on which I'm working) does support OMEMO:2 (it was actually the first client to implement it) + legacy one + OX (OpenPGP) + OX for Pubsub (so you can encrypt everything pubsub related: blog, forums, tickets, etc). ()

Anyway, there is a discovery mechanism, and clients do adapt the version used by peers, so there is no incompatibility. Kaidan choose for a while to have only OMEMO:2, because resources are limited and they were going for the latest version first, but resource are limited for everybody, and it took times for others to implement OMEMO:2 too.

NLnet/NGI did (and still does) gave financial support on several XMPP projects (including mine, huge thanks to them), and, curiously, when there is money to help, implementations happen. That's problem nb 1 with XMPP: lack of financial resource.

() GUI (notably web UI) is being reworked, not stable yet, but the CLI is pretty solid.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#113

Post by rtpg »

lxgr wrote: post #110
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…

As I understand it, Matrix is a much better conceptual fit for the IRC/Slack-like use case where users expect substantial messaging history to persist across new devices and often even for members newly joining a channel. XMPP started out as a message routing protocol, with server-side history (for individual users or channels) bolted on as an afterthought; Matrix is modeled around conversations/channels as a first-c…

I was generally "Matrix feels right" but I read through [0] and other discussions and I think that Matrix's E2E focus + way of duplicating everything just means that it suffers a lot of scalability issues that "plain old Jabber" won't have.

now Jabber has client issues, but stuff like Monal "basically work" for text + images + chat rooms. I'm excited for Fluux. You can of course set up one of the random web clients. Stuff like reactions "work", notifications is a solved problem.

But like... at a basic level, "I'm hosting a Jabber server for my small community" has a lot less headaches than with Matrix. Yes if your server goes down then you lose the chat. Oh no. Plenty survived off of IRC IMO.

For the HN crowd... I would say that there's still fun jank, but who doesn't like jankiness in their programs for fun? People should swarm to this opportunity to have some fun with busted tooling again!

[0] https://wiki.alopex.li/ADiveIntoOpenChat

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#114

Post by AlecSchueler »

inputmice wrote: post #3
dewey wrote: post #2

> Matrix reinvented the wheel as a rubber-tyred metro. On paper, it provides real benefits, such as climbing steeper inclines, which are then used to aggressively advertise and lobby local governments to buy in. But in the end, the municipality gets locked into a single vendor. I stumble upon Matrix from time to time, but Jabber I haven't really seen anywhere in the past decade after my internet friends moved to IRC.…

XMPP these days often gets used as a friends-and-family style messenger (Think WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal replacement) rather than something communities would use (Discord/IRC). A lot of users of XMPP are also out of the public eye. NATO, police forces and intelligence agencies use it. The community style channels are supported though and a search engine for them can be found here: https://search.jabber.network/chann…

> NATO, police forces and intelligence agencies use it

Is there anywhere to read more about this?

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#115

Post by rtpg »

Semaphor wrote: post #71
shadowgovt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the xmpp standard is absolutely brutal. I've tried to stand up a server and the amount of configuration I had to do just to get off the ground was absolute nonsense. It's sort of the Apache of chat protocols and that's not a compliment.

> I've tried to stand up a server and the amount of configuration I had to do I run my own server for 2 people. Using Prosody [0] took some config but wasn’t that hard. Easier than installing Arch, harder than installing Windows ;) Nowadays, there is also Snikket [1] by the Prosody maintainer, which is essentially an opinionated all-in-one configuration setup based on Prosody, barely any config needed. [0]: https://p…

to anyone reading this who is thinking of setting up snikket: suffer through setting up prosody. It's a bit futzy but you won't find yourself saying "ah if only I had tried a bit harder" 10x a minute when trying to configure things later on.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#117

Post by ezst »

lxgr wrote: post #110
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…

As I understand it, Matrix is a much better conceptual fit for the IRC/Slack-like use case where users expect substantial messaging history to persist across new devices and often even for members newly joining a channel. XMPP started out as a message routing protocol, with server-side history (for individual users or channels) bolted on as an afterthought; Matrix is modeled around conversations/channels as a first-c…

> Matrix is a much better conceptual fit for the IRC/Slack-like use case

Debatable, this mostly boils down to the client design choices and priorities, and has little to nothing to do with the protocol. Someone came-up with a metaphor I like to illustrate it: the banquet and the barbecue¹. XMPP has "barbecue"-style clients like Conversations, Kaidan, Dino?, and other that are rather "banquet"-style like Gajim, Fluux, Movim, …

I personally use Conversations on the go and Gajim otherwise. I also happen to have interfaced all my "high-volume/many-participants" IRC chans from back in the days with the biboumi² gateway, so they appear to my XMPP clients as native XMPP groupchats, and the experience was great-enough for me to ultimately drop weechat a decade or so ago and have all my "banquet"-style chans under one XMPP roof.

> between mixed extension support at the client and server side, with XMPP you can never really know if you're getting "plain old Jabber" or something more like Matrix in terms of user experience.

From over a decade of using XMPP daily, this concern is more of philosophical nature than anything. The vast majority of the people you'll reach over XMPP use a decently modern and maintained client that will "just work". Worst case, they will still be getting your messages and the meaning across, because the "message passing" core of XMPP was defined 25-odds years ago and hasn't changed.

The real "risk" for XMPP would be to have a large number of users stuck on an unmaintained client, and users staying behind for years while the ecosystem moves on. We had a bit of that with pidgin 8-or-so years ago. The worse that happens is that you can't use the latest E2EE scheme with them, or that attachments are slower to arrive, this sort of things. That's IMO not bad for a 25 years old protocol that's truly decentralized.

¹: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/banquets-and-bar...

²: https://codeberg.org/poezio/biboumi/

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#118

Post by Dormeno »

opan wrote: post #88
shadowgovt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny because I remember having an issue where my friend was sending me messages, and he couldn't read my messages, and my mobile client (Siskin) didn't let me turn off encryption for outgoing messages.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#120

Post by tcfhgj »

opan wrote: post #90
tcfhgj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Define what you think are more than the basics?
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