5 ms·

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

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.
- y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
  > clients are wildly varying in quality. Yeah that's true. But psi+ on desktop and conversations on Android work pretty good. > multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history I am running a prosody server, and those extensions work very well with the mentioned clients.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    Can you look at my other comment in this thread about MAM seemingly not being available for prosody < 0.10? What did I misunderstand? Is the documentation unclear, can you clarify the situation? Or .. are you running a 0.10 snapshot?
    - y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
      I run 0.9, and the documentation says 0.9 Works and indeed it does (I am using it with the default storage backend).
      - darklajid 11y ago
        Based on your statement I asked in the (excellent, friendly) prosody chat room. So, that mod_mam works for 0.9 because (from the mod_mam documentation) 'If no archive-capable storage backend can be opened then an in-memory one will be used as fallback.' As far as I understand this means that a service restart (or a crash) wipes your archive and I assume you won't be able to migrate your archive between versions either?

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.
y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
> clients are wildly varying in quality. Yeah that's true. But psi+ on desktop and conversations on Android work pretty good. > multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history I am running a prosody server, and those extensions work very well with the mentioned clients.
- darklajid 11y ago
  Can you look at my other comment in this thread about MAM seemingly not being available for prosody < 0.10? What did I misunderstand? Is the documentation unclear, can you clarify the situation? Or .. are you running a 0.10 snapshot?
  - y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
    I run 0.9, and the documentation says 0.9 Works and indeed it does (I am using it with the default storage backend).
    - darklajid 11y ago
      Based on your statement I asked in the (excellent, friendly) prosody chat room. So, that mod_mam works for 0.9 because (from the mod_mam documentation) 'If no archive-capable storage backend can be opened then an in-memory one will be used as fallback.' As far as I understand this means that a service restart (or a crash) wipes your archive and I assume you won't be able to migrate your archive between versions either?