Never implemented this by myself, but I've read in the past this post on using Prosody, by the guys helpong the Low-Tech Magazine blog to become a self-hosted solar-powered site.
Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
91–100 of 156 posts
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#92Last time I tried this I couldn’t even find an iOS client that supported reactions. Hate on the complexity of Matrix all you like, but at least when you ask your family to use it, they get a modern experience and don’t feel like they’re giving up everything vs every other messenger they are used to.
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.
> designed a terrible protocol
Have you looked at the protocol? Have you built things in both? I have, and I think the Matrix protocol is pretty good. The goals are different. It's not a send once and forget kind of thing, like XMPP, Signal and email. It's about keeping your chats synced on your server, and with any other server you happen to be federating with. It's Discord or Slack, except federated. That's not easy, and it's not simple, but it has huge advantages too.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#93Last time I tried this I couldn’t even find an iOS client that supported reactions. Hate on the complexity of Matrix all you like, but at least when you ask your family to use it, they get a modern experience and don’t feel like they’re giving up everything vs every other messenger they are used to.
> Last time I tried this I couldn’t even find an iOS client that supported reactions. Hate on the complexity of Matrix all you like, but at least when you ask your family to use it, they get a modern experience and don’t feel like they’re giving up everything vs every other messenger they are used to. Now if only it actually worked consistently and reliably. I'm not being snarky, the app is flakey as hell. Reactions…
I dunno, it works great for me. I've been self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years and I'd not describe it as "flakey" at all.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#94"Since 3 years the European Commission works on a plan to automatically monitor all chat, email and messenger conversations.12 If this is going to pass, and I strongly hope it will not, the European Union is moving into a direction we know from states suppressing freedom of speech." If this come to pass, there will be two approaches: 1. People will not share anything important online, only in person 2. Every friends…
On #2, even though I and most of my friends/family are in the US, likely going to offer such to friends and family... I'm about to move from a /29 to /28 subnet to run a few extra services on my hosted server. I've got a nice mailu config and wanting to expand with Nextcloud (or alternative) and likely xmpp services... I mostly use a pretty light host VM and docker compose configuration to make up/down/backup/restore…
Been running jabberd for probably >10 years. Horrible experience (for the users) and terrible clients. Sometimes you'd just appear online while not sending/receiving anything.
I switched to Nextcloud Talk after Skype shutdown and migrated all my family there. They love it. We have a private cloud, we can share photos and other files, great mobile support... The only issue at the moment is relatively long delay before receiving a message (up to 30secs?) since I've been too lazy to setup redis.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#95> support clustering (for high-availabilty purposes)
That reminds me of one idea I had back in the day. You see, not everyone has the skill nor time to set up their own server, so clients rely on 3rd party servers. But sometimes these servers either experience intermittent connectivity issues or just die out altogether, which means users now have to set up second account and re-add everyone, while also scattering chat history across multiple accounts. What I'd like to see is some way of linking accounts across multiple servers, so that:
- message delivery could have transparent fallback (it gets delivered to me@bar.com if me@foo.com is unavailable)
- you don't have to add and authorize multiple accounts
- rosters and chat histories also get synchronizes between the two
A lot of that could probably be hacked around just on the client side, and I don't have good answers to questions like "what happens if I want to unlink two accounts for some reason".
(And going a bit off-topic: I also wish I could use multiple email addresses while registering in other places, because email provides too can fail, close altogether, or even just ban you for no good reason while also having crappy bot-driven support@.)
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn't a single XMPP client for iOS that properly follows the iOS HIG and isn't ugly or unusable. There are very few clients that are even fully featured. The XMPP landscape on macOS is even more bleak.
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.
As an open-source XMPP project, we tried hard to find iOS developers willing to help with development (as volunteers, or even paid) and it's just so hard to find people in this intersection of interests.
If anyone reading this thread has iOS dev skills and cares about improving open-source messaging on iOS, feel free to get in touch.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
when my family used matrix for a couple years the e2ee features would randomly fail to decrypt history and would present my non technical family with that "match these emojis to unlock your account" screen all the time. between that and the unwanted features (federation, spaces) that aren't useful in a texting context, no way to search message logs, and a server to maintain. ... I went back to RCS
fwiw, the vast majority of Matrix encryption errors got fixed by 2024 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHzh2Y7BABQ etc). Search on mobile (in Element X) is on its way and is making good progress: https://youtu.be/Q6NSmptZIS4?t=1297 from a demo from a few days ago. Finally, self-maintaining servers now exist ( https://element.io/server-suite , complete with AGPL distro: https://element.io/server-suite/community ) (On…
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Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
On #2, even though I and most of my friends/family are in the US, likely going to offer such to friends and family... I'm about to move from a /29 to /28 subnet to run a few extra services on my hosted server. I've got a nice mailu config and wanting to expand with Nextcloud (or alternative) and likely xmpp services... I mostly use a pretty light host VM and docker compose configuration to make up/down/backup/restore…
Been running jabberd for probably >10 years. Horrible experience (for the users) and terrible clients. Sometimes you'd just appear online while not sending/receiving anything. I switched to Nextcloud Talk after Skype shutdown and migrated all my family there. They love it. We have a private cloud, we can share photos and other files, great mobile support... The only issue at the moment is relatively long delay before…
I see these comments a lot from people who have very old deployments and didn't keep up with changing best practices. The users of these deployments also tend to be using out-of-date software such as Pidgin to access their account.
There is zero reason for long delays or lost messages in XMPP.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#99Earlier 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.
> designed a terrible protocol Have you looked at the protocol? Have you built things in both? I have, and I think the Matrix protocol is pretty good. The goals are different. It's not a send once and forget kind of thing, like XMPP, Signal and email. It's about keeping your chats synced on your server, and with any other server you happen to be federating with. It's Discord or Slack, except federated. That's not eas…
> It's not a send once and forget kind of thing, like XMPP, Signal and email. It's about keeping your chats synced on your server, and with any other server you happen to be federating with. It's Discord or Slack, except federated. That's not easy, and it's not simple, but it has huge advantages too.
And huge disadvantages. 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.
Re: Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The default ports are often blocked on such networks (public wifi, corporate firewalls, etc.), but also often open. 5222 is used by e.g. WhatsApp, 5223 is used by e.g. Apple push notifications. So it's not as bad as it could be. But it's also totally possible to run XMPP over 443, and this is a feature of many popular XMPP deployments. If you're self-hosting, there are some guides for different deployment approaches…
> 5222 is used by e.g. WhatsApp I left in 2019, but when I was there, WhatsApp used port 5222, but the client would try port 443 if port 5222 didn't work. After it had tried those enough, it would try on port 80 with HTTP wrappers. Really, the right model for a public service is what AOL did for AIM. Listen on all the ports. Clients should try on the 'proper' port, then 443, then 80, then random permutation. Skip cer…
Yeah. I'd be surprised if Apple didn't use similar logic. XMPP can do multiple ports (a deployment can specify the recommended order in DNS). I've not heard of an all-ports deployment, but it does sound like an interesting experiment :)