8 ms·

In an ideal world: - open source, client and server - federation (both for the ability to split the net/have a private/enterprise solution and for redundancy)

In an ideal world: - open source, client and server - federation (both for the ability to split the net/have a private/enterprise solution and for redundancy) - multi device support (tablet, phone, desktop etc) - clients for all major platforms (that is, not just mobile platforms) - strong cryptography - no phone number required (can be installed on your desktop/tablet only, doesn't _need_ a phone number but might offer to search for contacts that gave one instead) Note that Telegram fails quite some of those, but as far as I'm aware it's the closest I can get at this point.

y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
xmpp is the solution. use your own server, or use one of the many public ones. has clients for all major platforms, crypto is the best around (otr, gpg), does not require phone numbers or sim cards, is open and a public standard.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  XMPP have a lot of problems: - Every server support different extensions. Extreemly fragmented. - No reliable file transfer - No reliable cross device sync - Almost all clients are junky - OTR and GPG are not the best crypto, but more trusted one as it is old and simple. Axolotl Ratchet beat them in every part. This problems lead us to make messaging (actor.im) from scratch.
- darklajid 11y ago
  I was running a prosody instance for a while. I have a 'Programming Jabber' book from O'Reilly sitting in the shelf next to me. I am (was?) a xmpp fan. The big problem with that one was that - clients are wildly varying in quality. Mobile clients are quite good by now, desktop clients are rather meh, ugly, all over the place - multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history, which was a moving target and unsupported in most clients/servers last time I checked. That ignores that you need a good number of other extensions to make XMPP mobile friendly (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages). XMPP isn't exactly mobile friendly (chattiness, bandwidth) either, as far as I am aware. In short: Yeah, I would love to agree that XMPP is the solution. Right now I'd say it would be at best ~similar~ to Telegram: A solution with some (different) trade-offs.
  - _jomo 11y ago
    I agree client quality is not perfect, however XMPP can do a lot of things with the proper extensions. Daniel Gultsch (dev of the Android 'Conversations' client [0]) held an interesting talk [1] in 2015 on modernizing XMPP. He explains a the issues XMPP has/had and how they fixed them. He also covers problems that still exist (or existed at the time) and possible solutions. Highly recommend watching it. 0: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations https://github.com/siacs/Conversations 1: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challenges_of_modern_day_instant_messaging https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challeng...
    - darklajid 11y ago
      Thank you for the link, I'm watching the video while I write this message. But - I just checked again: My xmpp server of choice (Prosody) doesn't support MAM today¹. That's a killer, without that xmpp isn't even in the same league as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. for me. I expect to be able to open my client and be able to continue a conversation at this point. 1: There's https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html but it is unclear if that's in a usable state. It states at the bottom of the page that this 'works' for 0.9 and 0.10, but the 'storage backend' sections gives an example that works for 0.10 only and links to https://prosody.im/doc/storage https://prosody.im/doc/storage where you'll find a table with backends. ONLY the 'sql' backend seems to support the archive store, and that's for 0.10 only. 0.10 isn't released yet. The takeaway is: MAM seems to work if you're using the unreleased version 0.10 of prosody. And .. I haven't even checked the client support yet.
      - slight 11y ago
        I'm using Prosody 0.10 with MAM and carbons with Gajim on Linux and Conversations on Android. Working fine.
  - rakoo 11y ago
    > (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages) Oh, you also want Message Delivery Receipts (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html), not just Stream Management (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html) I agree with you, XEPs fragmentation is a huge mess. I'd love to see more cohesive development around that specific point instead of just discussion about the technical parts of a XEP.
ex3ndr 11y ago
So nice to hear it: - We are completely open source under Apache License 2.0 - We are working on the federation. Unfortunately there are no production ready federation protocols at all. XMPP is dead. - We are work on multiple devices - We have Android, iOS, Win/Lin/Mac. Anything else? Windows Phone is dead too, other html5-based phones are not popular yet. - We have two layer TLS with russian and us encryption together. We are in progress in porting Signal's end-to-end protocol. - You can use email or phone based auth. Our Email-based auth is named "enterprise", but it is same as personal.
- beluria 11y ago
  I'd like to point out about your statement on Windows Phone: your monetization plan is about business users, right? Well, there's quite a few enterprise players that are a good chunk on Windows Phone (now Windows Mobile), if not entirely Windows stack. I do not think it's wise to ignore a not-so-small target, given that your competition do support the platform.
  - ex3ndr 11y ago
    Thank you. We can easily implement new apps for new platforms during our architecture. Will see if someone will ask about this and will be ready to pay for this.
- darklajid 11y ago
  To be explicit (you implied being involved ofc): You're the CEO of actor, right? :) Thank you for the replies. Questions: 1) My first "Why Actor" question still stands. How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions? The web page didn't help me. 2) How are you planning to make money/to stay in business? Regarding the bullet points: - How easy is it to build/run a server? - Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix [1][2]. Did you look into that? - Can you explain 'two layer TLS with russian and us encryption'? Or point me to a resource about that? 1: http://matrix.org http://matrix.org 2: http://vector.im http://vector.im
newman314 11y ago
No metadata leakage Easily resettable IDs
newman314 11y ago
No metadata leakage Easily resettable IDs

y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago

xmpp is the solution. use your own server, or use one of the many public ones. has clients for all major platforms, crypto is the best around (otr, gpg), does not require phone numbers or sim cards, is open and a public standard.

ex3ndr 11y ago
XMPP have a lot of problems: - Every server support different extensions. Extreemly fragmented. - No reliable file transfer - No reliable cross device sync - Almost all clients are junky - OTR and GPG are not the best crypto, but more trusted one as it is old and simple. Axolotl Ratchet beat them in every part. This problems lead us to make messaging (actor.im) from scratch.
darklajid 11y ago
I was running a prosody instance for a while. I have a 'Programming Jabber' book from O'Reilly sitting in the shelf next to me. I am (was?) a xmpp fan. The big problem with that one was that - clients are wildly varying in quality. Mobile clients are quite good by now, desktop clients are rather meh, ugly, all over the place - multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history, which was a moving target and unsupported in most clients/servers last time I checked. That ignores that you need a good number of other extensions to make XMPP mobile friendly (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages). XMPP isn't exactly mobile friendly (chattiness, bandwidth) either, as far as I am aware. In short: Yeah, I would love to agree that XMPP is the solution. Right now I'd say it would be at best ~similar~ to Telegram: A solution with some (different) trade-offs.
- _jomo 11y ago
  I agree client quality is not perfect, however XMPP can do a lot of things with the proper extensions. Daniel Gultsch (dev of the Android 'Conversations' client [0]) held an interesting talk [1] in 2015 on modernizing XMPP. He explains a the issues XMPP has/had and how they fixed them. He also covers problems that still exist (or existed at the time) and possible solutions. Highly recommend watching it. 0: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations https://github.com/siacs/Conversations 1: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challenges_of_modern_day_instant_messaging https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challeng...
  - darklajid 11y ago
    Thank you for the link, I'm watching the video while I write this message. But - I just checked again: My xmpp server of choice (Prosody) doesn't support MAM today¹. That's a killer, without that xmpp isn't even in the same league as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. for me. I expect to be able to open my client and be able to continue a conversation at this point. 1: There's https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html but it is unclear if that's in a usable state. It states at the bottom of the page that this 'works' for 0.9 and 0.10, but the 'storage backend' sections gives an example that works for 0.10 only and links to https://prosody.im/doc/storage https://prosody.im/doc/storage where you'll find a table with backends. ONLY the 'sql' backend seems to support the archive store, and that's for 0.10 only. 0.10 isn't released yet. The takeaway is: MAM seems to work if you're using the unreleased version 0.10 of prosody. And .. I haven't even checked the client support yet.
    - slight 11y ago
      I'm using Prosody 0.10 with MAM and carbons with Gajim on Linux and Conversations on Android. Working fine.
- rakoo 11y ago
  > (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages) Oh, you also want Message Delivery Receipts (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html), not just Stream Management (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html) I agree with you, XEPs fragmentation is a huge mess. I'd love to see more cohesive development around that specific point instead of just discussion about the technical parts of a XEP.

ex3ndr 11y ago

So nice to hear it: - We are completely open source under Apache License 2.0 - We are working on the federation. Unfortunately there are no production ready federation protocols at all. XMPP is dead. - We are work on multiple devices - We have Android, iOS, Win/Lin/Mac. Anything else? Windows Phone is dead too, other html5-based phones are not popular yet. - We have two layer TLS with russian and us encryption together. We are in progress in porting Signal's end-to-end protocol. - You can use email or phone based auth. Our Email-based auth is named "enterprise", but it is same as personal.

beluria 11y ago
I'd like to point out about your statement on Windows Phone: your monetization plan is about business users, right? Well, there's quite a few enterprise players that are a good chunk on Windows Phone (now Windows Mobile), if not entirely Windows stack. I do not think it's wise to ignore a not-so-small target, given that your competition do support the platform.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  Thank you. We can easily implement new apps for new platforms during our architecture. Will see if someone will ask about this and will be ready to pay for this.
darklajid 11y ago
To be explicit (you implied being involved ofc): You're the CEO of actor, right? :) Thank you for the replies. Questions: 1) My first "Why Actor" question still stands. How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions? The web page didn't help me. 2) How are you planning to make money/to stay in business? Regarding the bullet points: - How easy is it to build/run a server? - Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix [1][2]. Did you look into that? - Can you explain 'two layer TLS with russian and us encryption'? Or point me to a resource about that? 1: http://matrix.org http://matrix.org 2: http://vector.im http://vector.im

newman314 11y ago

No metadata leakage Easily resettable IDs

newman314 11y ago

No metadata leakage Easily resettable IDs