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Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

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Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#161

Post by lxgr »

goffi wrote: post #157
lxgr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. I'd like to have lxgr@example.com hosted at xmpp.foo.com today, but if foo.com shuts down unexpectedly one day, I'd like to be able to redirect it to xmpp.bar.com. I might lose my chat history and maybe my contact list if I don't have a local backup of it, but people would still be able to reach me as lxgr@example.com. Ideally, I'd be able to upload my local, end-to-end encrypted backup to xmpp.bar.com and…

Hey. I'm currently working on this: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0516.html

This is awesome, thank you!

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#162

Post by selfhoster1312 »

account42 wrote: post #160
ezst wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> We had a bit of that with pidgin 8-or-so years ago. 8 years ago? Pidgin still doesn't do MAM today.

Yes, but i haven't met someone who uses Pidgin in more than 5 years. Still, the pidgin team appears to be alive and their blog is always a good read!

https://pidgin.im/post/

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#163

Post by selfhoster1312 »

tcfhgj wrote: post #59
akho wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. It's a quality of the problem, not of the solution. I actually think XMPP does a better, more structured job here.

> Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. not it isn't - still today there's no choice between incompatible room types or incompatible encryption algorithms and whatever else.

I don't have a horse in this race, but "incompatible room types" is precisely an issue i encountered on a selfhosted server. Agreed, that was for S2S federation and not C2S, but that was an issue.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#164

Post by writtenone »

Dormeno wrote: post #133
edhelas wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define worse

This is not an exhaustive list, just stuff off the top of my head. Finding/viewing/sharing/joining chats Adding users (can't find them, invites not being received, etc) Broken messaging (messages not arriving, formatting not being handled or handled the same way, even on the same XMPP server!) OMEMO issues (key exchange not working, or OMEMO keys getting lost or something when both clients involved were working perfe…

Look into SimpleX Chat. It's like Telegram but with trustworthy encryption that's always-on, multiple profiles, and the servers are interchangeable so if one or two go down you can just switch them out.

Evgeny is a venture capitalist (ew) but the product is solid and they've published two TrailOfBits audits with a third completed and awaiting publication by TOB

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#165

Post by pixelschubsi »

tcfhgj wrote: post #152
pixelschubsi wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open protocol variant of that is called OMEMO. Same double ratchet and implemented using Signal's library (the same as used by WhatsApp) in many XMPP clients

> the same as used by WhatsApp source? wouldn't that be a license violation?

WhatsApp paid WhisperSystems (the previous Signal company) for a commercial license. Same as Google. Dual-licensing their encryption protocol library was their main source of income back then.

AFAIK, even today you can fetch the WhatsApp Android apk, extract the zip and do a `strings classes*.dex | grep signal` to find class and package names matching the sources in the signal-protocol-java repository in the Signal GitHub.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#166

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Recommendation: if you're trained under a boulder, use the device you're running an XMPP chat client on to call 911.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#167

Post by pkulak »

pixelschubsi wrote: post #106
pkulak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah yeah yeah. I’ve heard this for 8 years. And yet, everyone can talk a great game, no one can build a mobile client that is anywhere near the quality of any other chat platform. And here I am, hosting a Matrix server for my family for 6 years now, with no issues and an amazing experience, from the backend to the huge variety of mobile clients, a mature Rust sdk that I can hook bots into with ease, etc.

Matrix doesn't even support server-to-client message pushing, only polling. Which means, if you want your phone to receive a message while your client is in the background, you have to use a non-Matrix protocol to receive those. This protocol is XMPP in 99% of the time, both Apple and Google use XMPP to connect the phones to their push notification service. On Android, some Matrix clients offer the option to use non-…

What mobile OS do you use that allows an app to maintain a persistent TCP connection forever? Honest question. Last I checked, even Lineage/Graphene/etc will kill a background app after some amount of time. Doesn't matter if it's an hour or three days; if it ever happens, that's a deal breaker.

I think the right solution is to use a different notification service, not controlled by Google or Apple, not to get rid of the concept altogether.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#168

Post by rtpg »

lxgr wrote: post #154
rtpg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideally, I'd like to have me@mydomain.com as my persistent XMPP ID that I can freely migrate across servers just by updating a DNS record without having to worry too much about who is actually hosting the server. The AT protocol does this right. I suppose here you're saying "I should be able to do this without providers having to do work"? Like you show up with lxgr@foo.com to bar.com and create an account, and eve…

Not quite. I'd like to have lxgr@example.com hosted at xmpp.foo.com today, but if foo.com shuts down unexpectedly one day, I'd like to be able to redirect it to xmpp.bar.com. I might lose my chat history and maybe my contact list if I don't have a local backup of it, but people would still be able to reach me as lxgr@example.com. Ideally, I'd be able to upload my local, end-to-end encrypted backup to xmpp.bar.com and…

I mean apart from the uploading of the backup xmpp already lets you do this right? That's my impression at least. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

(The premise in my understanding is that you own example.com and control its DNS records right? And not "well I hosted on foo.com as name@foo.com but it went down and now I want to move")

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#169

Post by account42 »

rtpg wrote: post #113
lxgr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Yes if your server goes down then you lose the chat.

Don't all actively maintained servers support persistent message archive management now?

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#170

Post by account42 »

lxgr wrote: post #121
rtpg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> notifications is a solved problem. Eh, last time I tried I still got leftover notifications for messages I had long read and even replied to on a different client hanging around on my other devices. (To be fair, Matrix does the same thing too, but only in roughly 50% of all cases, which is much more infuriating than something I can at least understand as a fundamental protocol limitation and not a weird implementat…

> Eh, last time I tried I still got leftover notifications for messages I had long read and even replied to on a different client hanging around on my other devices.

What server and client(s)? I have not seen this issue with ejabberd + Conversations. Might also be a matter of enabling the right extensions on the server.

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