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Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
131–140 of 156 posts
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#132If you're looking for something that's a little less hassle and has some very sane defaults, try https://snikket.org/
I'm missing the actual self hosted guide where I can use my own hardware instead of a VPS.
Can't you install docker compose on your own hardware and follow this? https://snikket.org/service/quickstart/
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand why everything has to be centralized/ routed through an intermediary. Well I do understand it, modern big corps wants to be that intermediary for various reasons, but thats a business reason not a technical one. centralized? no If you sign up for messaging on let's say Signal, do you really want your client to talk to Facebook, Google and dozens of other services? And do you want the users of you…
My idea is basically person to person comms. Why can't they just send messages directly to each other? I guess mobile can't do this and relies on polling (i.e. you can't expose a service running on the phone for security reasons). And when the group gets large enough, beyond say 3-4, sending messages to each recipient gets unwieldly
Check out delta.chat thy have solved super simple p2p messages
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
you may be mixing up Amdocs UC (which i ran) which was explicitly OTT-messaging-for-telcos… with Matrix, which is what the UC team did next. The point of Matrix is/was to replace the PSTN with a decentralised alt on the internet - so everyone (including Amdocs) could then go build cool stuff on top.
isn't matrix is direct continuation of amdocs uc with same team, your including ?
nope, Matrix has zero code or philosophy in common with Amdocs UC (which was proprietary, centralised, unencrypted XMPP + SIP held together with HTTP). Instead, after we gave up on trying to persuade telcos to roll out OTT messaging apps built on the Amdocs UC stack, we started Matrix as an new project to instead try to disrupt the PSTN (decentralising & disrupting it much as cryptocurrencies try to disrupt legacy payments networks). The reason Amdocs funded us to do it was in case we were successful enough that Amdocs could then sell Matrix solutions alongside PSTN solutions in the long term future.
In other words, this wasn't really a "hey we need to sell messaging apps to telcos" play - it was a long-term R&D experiment, more like Bell Labs funding UNIX.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
XMPP is a client/server model too, that needs to store messages for some configurable amount of time. What distinction are you trying to make here? There are very few peer-to-peer messengers.
Yeah peer-to-peer would be my idea. Send directly to each participants device, no third party involved, at least for the messaging part. So one less vector for attack. You'd probably want a central service for determining who's online. Wouldn't work well for more than a few people, but not every conversation has group sizes that large.
Also very difficult because:
- direct connections are really hard (Tailscale built a whole company on solving this one problem)
- even Tailscale can't establish direct connections without a coordination server
- even if you can reliably, and always, establish direct connections, it doesn't matter if someone is offline
- push notifications don't work without a server, on Android or iOS, so even if you're online, you're out of luck (won't ever get a new message because there's no push notification to tell the client to connect, and you can't just leave a TCP connection open forever on a mobile phone)
My take is that it's fine to have a server in the middle with E2EE. That's the whole point of E2EE.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
XMPP lacked good, modern clients, so folks designed a terrible protocol, and then made modern clients with this kind of feature for that protocol. There’s an extra step that could have been skipped entirely there and we’d be better off.
It would be cool for clients and protocols to be separated by an abstraction layer, it might change the n times m to n plus m but I suppose it's difficult
We have precedent of exactly this.
Pidgin implemented support for various networks under an abstraction layer and had a unified UI for all of them.
XMPP implements this via gateways. I used to talk from XMPP with folks who used MSN or Yahoo on their end. We have gateways for Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal nowadays.
The Nokia N900 used the Telepathy framework to expose a local D-Bus messaging service which itself connected to various networks (SMS, MSN, XMPP, etc). The UI was a single unified one for all these networks.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't matrix is direct continuation of amdocs uc with same team, your including ?
nope, Matrix has zero code or philosophy in common with Amdocs UC (which was proprietary, centralised, unencrypted XMPP + SIP held together with HTTP). Instead, after we gave up on trying to persuade telcos to roll out OTT messaging apps built on the Amdocs UC stack, we started Matrix as an new project to instead try to disrupt the PSTN (decentralising & disrupting it much as cryptocurrencies try to disrupt legacy pa…
ok. now i remember things better let me rephrase it. matrix was initiated by/inside amdocs. it (given that it was amdocs) was meant to be sold to telecoms to compete with OTT offerings (open source wording, etc - amdocs was adding it to everything back in this timeframe as it was trendy).
I was sufficiently "high up" in organization to hear this pitch. For record I said that they (telecoms) won't buy it and I didn't like project technically
Later when Amdocs saw that it's a no go they span you outside and later cut the funding.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this true of most open source software in iOS? The intersection of developers who want to develop on and for a proprietary walled platform and also want to work on open source clients for open standard, descentralised protocol must be pretty small.
I'm not even against the walled garden, it's just that developing on iOS is really painful compared to, say, web.
Oh and I have made an iOS app that uses XMPP before, but it wasn't general purpose chat.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#139Anyone considering wiring Agents to XMPP? Seems like a convergence of A2A and human chat, and supports all the human-interface pieces of agents like slash commands. You can build many topologies with XMPP, and there is a wealth of extant source code.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
nope, Matrix has zero code or philosophy in common with Amdocs UC (which was proprietary, centralised, unencrypted XMPP + SIP held together with HTTP). Instead, after we gave up on trying to persuade telcos to roll out OTT messaging apps built on the Amdocs UC stack, we started Matrix as an new project to instead try to disrupt the PSTN (decentralising & disrupting it much as cryptocurrencies try to disrupt legacy pa…
ok. now i remember things better let me rephrase it. matrix was initiated by/inside amdocs. it (given that it was amdocs) was meant to be sold to telecoms to compete with OTT offerings (open source wording, etc - amdocs was adding it to everything back in this timeframe as it was trendy). I was sufficiently "high up" in organization to hear this pitch. For record I said that they (telecoms) won't buy it and I didn't…
> matrix was initiated by/inside amdocs.
it was initiated very much by me & the UC team while inside Amdocs.
> it (given that it was amdocs) was meant to be sold to telecoms to compete with OTT offerings
in the 5-10 year horizon, yes. And indeed eventually (as Element) we have ended up with a bunch of telco customers. However, this was not the immediate goal at the time - it's not like Matrix was created to improve EBIT for Amdocs UC; it was a long-term R&D play.
> Later when Amdocs saw that it's a no go they span you outside and later cut the funding.
It was the opposite. Amdocs saw that Matrix had legs - e.g. Ericsson started selling Matrix-based solutions (stuff like https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/23/when-ericsson-discovered-...) - but also saw that it didn't fit inside Amdocs. The whole idea of Matrix is to be an open standard for everyone, just like XMPP or SIP or HTTP. For it to succeed, it obviously couldn't live inside Amdocs.
So, they agreed to both cut funding and span us out; we then raised funding independently and set up The Matrix.org Foundation as non-profit to look after Matrix for everyone, and separately set up Element as for-profit to fund our work on Matrix. It's not exactly been a smooth journey (see https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=363 for my FOSDEM talk trying to explain the route so far), but I can confidently say that Matrix was not borne out of trying to scratch an immediate business itch for Amdocs, but instead a longer-term experiment in building something better for everyone (including Amdocs).
But what do I know :D