Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

mail.jabber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 169 posts

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#81

Post by problems »

hackuser wrote: post #29

These would be my concerns about potential differences between Signal and an 'Easy XMPP' client; would someone who knows Signal say whether these are accurate?: * Signal users are not anonymous; Signal requires users' phone numbers. * Signal is centralized. Is there a way to run your own Signal server? * Signal uses Google Chrome on the desktop (and Android?) and Google Play Services (or some part of them) on Android…

So how about comparing rather than with Signal, instead with Conversations (https://conversations.im/)

It's XMPP based and offers many Signal-like features. Seems very similar to the goals of this.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#83

Post by rhblake »

rebuilder wrote: post #60
0XAFFE wrote: post #36

I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff. It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere. EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.

Riot looks nice as far as I can tell. Is there any documentation, proper list of features, what kinds of bridges exist, how to use them etc? The info on riot.im seems really sparse.

See https://matrix.org/ for all that. Riot is the flagship Matrix client, but there are many other alternatives in various states of development.

For bridges that you can run on your on "homeserver" (if you indeed want to run your own server!), see https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#applica....

If you use the matrix.org homeserver, they bridge with a number of IRC networks, including freenode and OFTC. The closest thing to an official list that I've seen is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/2....

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#84

Post by rhblake »

kuschku wrote: post #66
unicornporn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I registered when it was called called Vector and recently started using it more seriously. It is freaking fantastic. Voice/video calls actually works and the Android app is very good. It was long since I had such as strong feeling of "this is it". When it comes to protocols (as opposed to "services"), they're seldom replaced. I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of t…

> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).

I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/) - freenode and IRCnet.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#85

Post by zer0t3ch »

devnonymous wrote: post #68
upofadown wrote: post #64

The real issue is federated IM vs non-federated IM. Anyone can make a IM system work off a single server. People do it all the time and we have had a series of incompatible IM systems in the past. Signal and Whatsapp are just the current flavours. Soon they will be gone and there will be new hotness. At this point I consider any non-federating IM system to be part of the problem. As mentioned by someone in the linked…

> Asking someone to get a XMPP client so they can > communicate with you normally just ends in confusion. That's not entirely valid. I mean, look at bittorrent, they had an ^official^ client and then there were other clients and people who did not know anything about configuring their clients still managed to use them. Asking someone to used an XMPP client, ideally should be the same as asking someone to use a torren…

> Asking someone to used an XMPP client, ideally should be the same as asking someone to use a torrent client

It is the same, and the majority of people can't manage to do either.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#86

Post by Arathorn »

kuschku wrote: post #66
unicornporn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I registered when it was called called Vector and recently started using it more seriously. It is freaking fantastic. Voice/video calls actually works and the Android app is very good. It was long since I had such as strong feeling of "this is it". When it comes to protocols (as opposed to "services"), they're seldom replaced. I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of t…

> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).

How does it break down? The largest Matrix rooms we've seen have got ~50K users in them with very high traffic, and Synapse is good for at least 10 msgs/s currently (with orders of magnitude improvements on the horizon).

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#87

Post by bborud »

I wanted to like XMPP, but I never did. It drowns developers in complexity so they never get around to solving anything interesting or useful.

Bonus: I once discovered I had two of the main culprits for XMPP getting one of its worst misfeatures (lack of sensible framing) in the same room so I got to yell at them for it.

XMPP was form over function. And it wasn't even pleasant form.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#88

Post by Sanddancer »

hackuser wrote: post #29

These would be my concerns about potential differences between Signal and an 'Easy XMPP' client; would someone who knows Signal say whether these are accurate?: * Signal users are not anonymous; Signal requires users' phone numbers. * Signal is centralized. Is there a way to run your own Signal server? * Signal uses Google Chrome on the desktop (and Android?) and Google Play Services (or some part of them) on Android…

You're fighting the wrong battle here in order to get people to use better tools. Most people don't care if it's Free Software or not. They want something that's simple to use, and offers reasonable security. Right now, XMPP is not, due to the awful clients out there, and the attitudes towards any sort of comparisons with products that they are less philosophically aligned to.

This is perhaps the biggest problem Free Software programs have when you start treading away from things like a browser. There is a huge hostility to ease of use and building things that are Powerful Enough. People don't care if you have a lisp scripting language embedded in your app, they care about how long it takes to get started doing the stuff they care about with your software. Until usability becomes more important, then XMPP isn't going to gain traction.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#89

Post by upofadown »

bborud wrote: post #87

I wanted to like XMPP, but I never did. It drowns developers in complexity so they never get around to solving anything interesting or useful. Bonus: I once discovered I had two of the main culprits for XMPP getting one of its worst misfeatures (lack of sensible framing) in the same room so I got to yell at them for it. XMPP was form over function. And it wasn't even pleasant form.

In a sense the problem with XMPP is that it is too simple. If you are willing to type some XML you can log into a server and have a basic chat session over a telnet session. Hence the requirement for extensions to do anything else.

The alternative is to try to anticipate everything anyone would want to do with a protocol. That has problems as well. The XMPP approach is to accept everything and aggressively ignore everything not supported. XML is quite compatible with this approach.

XMPP uses the XML as the framing. An approach that could actually be considered clever if one is striving for simplicity in a protocol.

Re: Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?

#90

Post by panic »

The fundamental problem with decentralized messaging these days is push notifications. Apple, at least, makes it very hard for you to deliver APNS notifications without running a centralized server. XMPP and IRC will never work as well as a centralized service until the notification architecture changes.
Post reply on HN