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XMPP works – 1 July 2020

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Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#71

Post by kilo_bravo_3 »

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've been using Riot to connect to Matrix.

Works very well and Riot is on: iOS, MacOS, Windows, Google Play, F-Droid, Linux, and has a very nice web application.

This is what got me started: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c...

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#72

Post by rektide »

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…

> I'm not sure which Facebook you're using,

As I said, we're not using it anymore.

Ben Shapiro & BlueLives Matter were 6 of the 10 most reshared pieces of content yesterday & none of the other top 10 are anything but polarizing trashy antagonistic regressives either.

https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/128100072722610...

I would be willing to admit, this kind of content does not feature a lot in my personal experience when I did use Facebook. But in general, I'm not inclined to log in & stay logged in, as it doesn't add continuous value. And I don't want to give advertising-dollars to a platform that does, day after day after day, reliably, serve to brainwash America with these reactionary attention-hungry wolves.

I'd point out that the Salem witch trials you raise judged people based on fiction (there are no witches), & killed them. Losing some friends & your job for being a demonstratively terrible awful person does not seem like a fair comparison: there is real guilt, & the consequences seem survivable. I'm not sure that the ability of any one incident to become a lightning rod of attention is ideal, but it felt like being an absolutely terrible person for too long had no consequences: I would like to see more safety nets, more forgiveness, more healing, but there being consequences for actions is an enormous improvement over where we were, and frankly the consequences seem reasonably inline & reasonable in a vast majority of the situations at hand.

I'm sorry that this seems so overwhelming for you. I hope you can find some peace.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#73

Post by rektide »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #56
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.…

Good reply, thanks. I am very pro #XMPP. Which is also why I yearn for a couple real areas of improvement & focus:

* MIX. there's a new standard for group-chats/rooms that is far less ad-hoc/special-case, that uses other XMPP extensions (XEPs) very well & enables features people expect in chat these days. it's a good standard. MIX (XEP-0369) support is still alpha level or non-existent. this is needed for a quality experience, with reactions, chat history, & as a technical advancement out of a bad shifty early legacy solution.

* Video. There are not a lot of video supporting clients. I think the spec is mostly ok for 1:1 video. But "Muji" multi-user video got demoed a decade ago & works but is more or less unimplemented. This is not cool. I think Muji also should probably be rebuilt anyways atop MIX.

* web integration. i'd like to be able to use my XMPP account online in a well-defined way. xmpp should start to define ways to make user accounts also OpenID Connect (OIDC) providers, & begin to define interoperation for webrtc & XMPP & the web to work together harmoniously.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#74

Post by rektide »

MattJ100 wrote: post #34
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…

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…

Quick scan of the website & the github. Did not find direct mentions of XMPP. Does this interop with other XMPP systems or is this based-on-XMPP but standalone? I would not adopt or recommend this, framed as it is as it's own thing.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#75

Post by rektide »

jayd16 wrote: post #12
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…

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…

the MUC is not good. this is true. there is MIX, XEP-0369, that has a way better under-the-hood approach that re-uses a lot of the existing XEPs (whereas MUC was early & kind of it's own thing).

alas MIX adoption is very low. ejabberd got MIX support in 2016 but it's stayed at 0.1.0. and, more pressingly, i don't think any clients support it. this has to change for XMPP to pass MVP muster. https://www.reddit.com/r/xmpp/comments/arpruf/what_clients_s...

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#76

Post by parliament32 »

rakoo wrote: post #49
gspr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other. Think of the value of this! Anyone, anywhere, using whatever client they choose, can send a basic message to anyone and expect it to arrive and be taken seriously. Imagine if IM had worked the same way! I know XMPP is a shitstorm, but one can dream. Not until I left academia and started working for MegaCorp that mandate…

IM can work the same way, by tacking it on top of email: https://delta.chat/en/ (Bonus: encryption is done automatically for you, by default)

Email is not a synchronous channel, and shouldn't be treated as such. Plenty of mailservers will happily delay your messages for a few minutes for spam and virus scanning (because who cares if an email arrives a minute later), and you have all sorts of asynchronous things built into the major servers and protocols (queues, delays/greylisting, 4-day(!!) backoff-retries, etc).

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#77

Post by toast0 »

Arnt wrote: post #39
toast0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Android in 2011 could just run a connection in the background and actually work (assuming the client pings when idle / and adapts the ping interval to avoid stateful firewalls with low idle timeouts). But iOS doesn't let you do background sockets, so you need push messages, and that's hard to coordinate between unrelated XMPP servers and clients. Of course, modern Android doesn't let you have background sockets…

I have an android app that uses background connections; it works fine on modern Android. The connections are broken when people walk in and out of WLAN coverage, but as long as the app uses minimal CPU and network traffic Android doesn't intercede much.

Hmmm. Doesn't Android Doze randomly kill/pause your background execution?

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#78

Post by jojobas »

ta17711771 wrote: post #63
jojobas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Host your own server, don't make it public. 2) The fact that there were so many non-mandatory and sometimes competing XEPs was a major setback indeed. 3) There were measures for that, such as that unknown users should answer "how much is pi*0" kind of questions Matrix seems to solve items 2 and 4, lets see how much traction it gets.

Multiple government and large nonprofits have adopted it, what more traction can you ask for in free open source?

Adoption by "normal" users instead of Telegram/Whatsapp/whatever.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#79

Post by megous »

im3w1l wrote: post #69
megous wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everythin…

> 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. It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you c…

My use case is also to receive e-mails from non gmail/outlook users. In fact if I check my logs 1.5% of messages came from google's smtp service and 1 from outlook, out of last 15000 emails.

So if big provider drops 95% of incomming emails from non-big providers into black void, their service is less than useless to me, and their quality would be at par with small providers that can deliver 95% emails successfully.

Re: XMPP works – 1 July 2020

#80

Post by Arnt »

toast0 wrote: post #77
Arnt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an android app that uses background connections; it works fine on modern Android. The connections are broken when people walk in and out of WLAN coverage, but as long as the app uses minimal CPU and network traffic Android doesn't intercede much.

Hmmm. Doesn't Android Doze randomly kill/pause your background execution?

Not so I've really noticed. The user starting apps that require very much memory probably does too, but that's also a minor effect.

If you don't use scheduled jobs to reopen your connections, WLAN/mobile switching is a pain and there are some smaller similar pains. If you solve that big pain and make sure to use very little battery power, the smaller pains go away.

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