7 ms·

Eve Online Chat Is Moving to Ejabberd

106 points by mickael 9y ago

f055 9y ago
I could not find a definitive answer on Twitter, but does that mean Eve players will become one of the biggest XMPP users group? I wonder if Eve enables federation and chatting with outsiders using regular XMPP clients.
- Mashimo 9y ago
  > I wonder if Eve enables federation and chatting with outsiders using regular XMPP clients. It's not planned. To be precise in the beginning nothing will change for the players. They might be able to send messages which are four times as large. As far as i know a modern more modular design was the main reason. And thus offload some of the CPU utilisation to not-game server. More comments from the Dev here [0] and partly [1] here. [0] https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-new-chat-backend-coming-with-the-march-release/58715/ https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-new-chat-backend-com... [1] https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-eve-voice/58460/ https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-preparing-for-the-fu... (Filter by clickning on the blue [DEV] avatar near "Frequent Posters" and select 'x post in this thread' to only see posts from that developer.
  - mickael 9y ago
    Yes, that makes sense. I guess they can focus on developing the core game that way.
- kbwt 9y ago
  League of Legends chat is also XMPP.
  - chmod775 9y ago
    Fortnite as well
    - mickael 9y ago
      yes indeed :) https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-service-outage-at-3-4m-ccu https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-... They mention 3.4 million concurrent users online. From what they say on clustering, it looks that this is also ejabberd.
- throwawayReply 9y ago
  I doubt it, EVE typically has ~10-20k concurrents players, that's actually relatively small to other xmpp-based services.
  - nivertech 9y ago
    10-20k concurrent users is nothing. I maintained ejabberd with 500K concurrent and built customj Erlang systems handling million of concurrent users per node.
    - mickael 9y ago
      Yes, exactly: https://medium.com/processone/ejabberd-massive-scalability-1-node-2-million-concurrent-users-e5b159e6b209 https://medium.com/processone/ejabberd-massive-scalability-1... And this is on a single node. ejabberd can scale to a huge number of concurrent users.
- upofadown 9y ago
  Depends on what you class as a group. It is unlikely that their unfederated server will come close to the number of users on even the 114 public federated servers, much less all the federated private servers. I noticed something interesting while looking; it appears that at least one public XMPP server has experienced a recent large influx of new users. >"The number of daily active users has increased more then three-fold in the last year alone." [1] [1] https://jabber.at/b/temporary-suspension-of-registration/ https://jabber.at/b/temporary-suspension-of-registration/
  - mickael 9y ago
    On the increasing number of accounts, it could as well be due to a rise in spam that we have seen on XMPP.
    - upofadown 9y ago
      That's interesting. How do you do spam on XMPP?
      - ge0rg 9y ago
        You register with public jabber servers and send thousands of messages to crawled and constructed destination addresses: https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-im/ https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-... https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/xsender-the-source-of-all-the-recent-xmpp-spam/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/xsender-the-s... https://github.com/ge0rg/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto https://github.com/ge0rg/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto
        upofadown 9y ago
        OK, thanks. I hadn't thought such a thing would be worth the bother, but I guess spam will find a way. I guess the eventual problem here is that everyone affected will turn off reception of messages from strangers. That would make XMPP somewhat less useful as a general method of getting in touch with someone.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  That would probably be iOS users: https://www.quora.com/What-technology-does-the-iOS-Apple-Push-Notification-Service-APNS-use-to-maintain-a-persistent-connection-with-each-device-to-receive-such-fast-push-notifications https://www.quora.com/What-technology-does-the-iOS-Apple-Pus... EDIT: Or maybe Android users; looks like GCM is also XMPP behind the scenes.
y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
I am happy that XMPP gets some love. Centralised messengers are a real problem now. People on whatsapp are only reachable on whatsapp, same for viber, messenger, skype, ... We are in a really stupid situation. XMPP works now, is decentralised, has secure E2E encryption, is not controlled by a single entity, and has good clients for android and desktop (iOS is unfortunately missing). I am rooting for an XMPP comeback.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  What people seem to value is inline media, being able to vomit emojis everywhere, and chat syncs across multiple devices/OSs.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    Sync is possible in xmpp with the carbon copies extension. for the rest, we have unicode.
  - foepys 9y ago
    WhatsApp, the most popular messenger, does not allow chat sync. It's single device even. I don't think that's part of the features the average user values.
    - dijit 9y ago
      Not true in all cases. They have a wonderful backdoor into your the phone app so you can use the webchat/desktop app. You scan a code and it will allow the website to connect to your phone and download all your messages/photos/etc and talk real time to friends.. Funcionally identical to telegrams desktop app (except, obviously, using your phone as a gateway of some kind). This functionality makes me nervous honestly, because if the app allowed connections like this silently and downloads your details then wouldn't it be possible to just bypass the QR code for WhatsApp's server team? (Also, when I point this out I always get downvotes, so, maybe a response this time?)
      - 9y ago
kbwt 9y ago
Signal is also problematic.
- nileshtrivedi 9y ago
  Signal also requires biometrics to be shared with the govt for 1/6th of the world's population (India) by insisting on a phone number for registration.
  - justin66 9y ago
    How does India's government collect that information?
    - sn0opy 9y ago
      Best guess is that it is similar to Germany. In Germany, there are no anonymous prepaid SIM cards anymore. They're now registered to your name. Thus, in theory, the gov has access to it too.
      - fnord123 9y ago
        I wonder if there would be interest in sim swap parties. This is an idea I had with Oyster cards in London where you get together and swap Oyster cards with other people to confound the profile building.
        feintruled 9y ago
        I suppose a problem with that might be if someone who takes your SIM does something illegal with it. Then you are on the hook for it.
        rlpb 9y ago
        > Then you are on the hook for it. This is a myth. If you didn't commit a crime, you aren't on the hook for it. For example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/public-wi-fi-forget-the-scare-stories-read-this/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/publi... You might, however, get investigated (search warrant etc) because unless such mixing becomes really common, it's reasonable for the authorities to suspect you for the crime in the first instance. Edit: perhaps a better example is https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-open-wifi-operator-not-liable-for-pirate-users-160916/ https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-open-wifi-operator-not-lia...
okket 9y ago
Original source: https://blog.process-one.net/eve-online-chat-is-moving-to-ejabberd/ https://blog.process-one.net/eve-online-chat-is-moving-to-ej...
- dang 9y ago
  Normally we'd change it but since the author posted the medium.com link I assume he prefers that one.
mxuribe 9y ago
I'm wondering if this isn't a lost opportunity by not leveraging something a little more modern like the matrix protocol (which is still decentralized)??
jayd16 9y ago
As someone who's worked with ejabberd I was about to suggest they're in for a headache but it looks like the peak player count for Eve Online is something like 65k users. They might not even have to cluster.
- mickael 9y ago
  Well, the most difficult part is to understand how the Erlang VM / Environment works. Once you have set it up, ejabberd just works. You can have massive scale and large uptime. This, ultimately, saves bigger headaches.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    That's the promise but in my experience getting mnesia happy and keeping things clustered is huge pain for ops.
    - mickael 9y ago
      Well, in practice, it is more than a promise. You are not forced to use Mnesia. You can use other backends to simplify the ops. Yes, it is as simple and make managing the platform a breeze. You need to be as stateless as possible.
w0de0 9y ago
An interesting aside for the unfamiliar: Eve Online's server is a monolithic app built in Python 2.7 [0]. Anecdotally, it is a hellscape of spaghetti code, sparse documentation, and features whose implementation details are quite literally lost (in that no current maintainer knows how they work or where in the codebase they exist). 0 - https://www.eveonline.com/article/stackless-python-2.7/ https://www.eveonline.com/article/stackless-python-2.7/

106 points by mickael 9y ago

f055 9y ago

I could not find a definitive answer on Twitter, but does that mean Eve players will become one of the biggest XMPP users group? I wonder if Eve enables federation and chatting with outsiders using regular XMPP clients.

Mashimo 9y ago
> I wonder if Eve enables federation and chatting with outsiders using regular XMPP clients. It's not planned. To be precise in the beginning nothing will change for the players. They might be able to send messages which are four times as large. As far as i know a modern more modular design was the main reason. And thus offload some of the CPU utilisation to not-game server. More comments from the Dev here [0] and partly [1] here. [0] https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-new-chat-backend-coming-with-the-march-release/58715/ https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-new-chat-backend-com... [1] https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-eve-voice/58460/ https://forums.eveonline.com/t/dev-blog-preparing-for-the-fu... (Filter by clickning on the blue [DEV] avatar near "Frequent Posters" and select 'x post in this thread' to only see posts from that developer.
- mickael 9y ago
  Yes, that makes sense. I guess they can focus on developing the core game that way.
kbwt 9y ago
League of Legends chat is also XMPP.
- chmod775 9y ago
  Fortnite as well
  - mickael 9y ago
    yes indeed :) https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-service-outage-at-3-4m-ccu https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-... They mention 3.4 million concurrent users online. From what they say on clustering, it looks that this is also ejabberd.
throwawayReply 9y ago
I doubt it, EVE typically has ~10-20k concurrents players, that's actually relatively small to other xmpp-based services.
- nivertech 9y ago
  10-20k concurrent users is nothing. I maintained ejabberd with 500K concurrent and built customj Erlang systems handling million of concurrent users per node.
  - mickael 9y ago
    Yes, exactly: https://medium.com/processone/ejabberd-massive-scalability-1-node-2-million-concurrent-users-e5b159e6b209 https://medium.com/processone/ejabberd-massive-scalability-1... And this is on a single node. ejabberd can scale to a huge number of concurrent users.
upofadown 9y ago
Depends on what you class as a group. It is unlikely that their unfederated server will come close to the number of users on even the 114 public federated servers, much less all the federated private servers. I noticed something interesting while looking; it appears that at least one public XMPP server has experienced a recent large influx of new users. >"The number of daily active users has increased more then three-fold in the last year alone." [1] [1] https://jabber.at/b/temporary-suspension-of-registration/ https://jabber.at/b/temporary-suspension-of-registration/
- mickael 9y ago
  On the increasing number of accounts, it could as well be due to a rise in spam that we have seen on XMPP.
  - upofadown 9y ago
    That's interesting. How do you do spam on XMPP?
    - ge0rg 9y ago
      You register with public jabber servers and send thousands of messages to crawled and constructed destination addresses: https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-im/ https://yaxim.org/blog/2017/12/22/spam-reduction-on-yax-dot-... https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/xsender-the-source-of-all-the-recent-xmpp-spam/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/xsender-the-s... https://github.com/ge0rg/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto https://github.com/ge0rg/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto
      - upofadown 9y ago
        OK, thanks. I hadn't thought such a thing would be worth the bother, but I guess spam will find a way. I guess the eventual problem here is that everyone affected will turn off reception of messages from strangers. That would make XMPP somewhat less useful as a general method of getting in touch with someone.
rsynnott 9y ago
That would probably be iOS users: https://www.quora.com/What-technology-does-the-iOS-Apple-Push-Notification-Service-APNS-use-to-maintain-a-persistent-connection-with-each-device-to-receive-such-fast-push-notifications https://www.quora.com/What-technology-does-the-iOS-Apple-Pus... EDIT: Or maybe Android users; looks like GCM is also XMPP behind the scenes.

y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago

I am happy that XMPP gets some love. Centralised messengers are a real problem now. People on whatsapp are only reachable on whatsapp, same for viber, messenger, skype, ... We are in a really stupid situation. XMPP works now, is decentralised, has secure E2E encryption, is not controlled by a single entity, and has good clients for android and desktop (iOS is unfortunately missing). I am rooting for an XMPP comeback.

digi_owl 9y ago
What people seem to value is inline media, being able to vomit emojis everywhere, and chat syncs across multiple devices/OSs.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Sync is possible in xmpp with the carbon copies extension. for the rest, we have unicode.
- foepys 9y ago
  WhatsApp, the most popular messenger, does not allow chat sync. It's single device even. I don't think that's part of the features the average user values.
  - dijit 9y ago
    Not true in all cases. They have a wonderful backdoor into your the phone app so you can use the webchat/desktop app. You scan a code and it will allow the website to connect to your phone and download all your messages/photos/etc and talk real time to friends.. Funcionally identical to telegrams desktop app (except, obviously, using your phone as a gateway of some kind). This functionality makes me nervous honestly, because if the app allowed connections like this silently and downloads your details then wouldn't it be possible to just bypass the QR code for WhatsApp's server team? (Also, when I point this out I always get downvotes, so, maybe a response this time?)
    - 9y ago

kbwt 9y ago

Signal is also problematic.

nileshtrivedi 9y ago
Signal also requires biometrics to be shared with the govt for 1/6th of the world's population (India) by insisting on a phone number for registration.
- justin66 9y ago
  How does India's government collect that information?
  - sn0opy 9y ago
    Best guess is that it is similar to Germany. In Germany, there are no anonymous prepaid SIM cards anymore. They're now registered to your name. Thus, in theory, the gov has access to it too.
    - fnord123 9y ago
      I wonder if there would be interest in sim swap parties. This is an idea I had with Oyster cards in London where you get together and swap Oyster cards with other people to confound the profile building.
      - feintruled 9y ago
        I suppose a problem with that might be if someone who takes your SIM does something illegal with it. Then you are on the hook for it.
        rlpb 9y ago
        > Then you are on the hook for it. This is a myth. If you didn't commit a crime, you aren't on the hook for it. For example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/public-wi-fi-forget-the-scare-stories-read-this/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/publi... You might, however, get investigated (search warrant etc) because unless such mixing becomes really common, it's reasonable for the authorities to suspect you for the crime in the first instance. Edit: perhaps a better example is https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-open-wifi-operator-not-liable-for-pirate-users-160916/ https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-open-wifi-operator-not-lia...

okket 9y ago

Original source: https://blog.process-one.net/eve-online-chat-is-moving-to-ejabberd/ https://blog.process-one.net/eve-online-chat-is-moving-to-ej...

dang 9y ago
Normally we'd change it but since the author posted the medium.com link I assume he prefers that one.

mxuribe 9y ago

I'm wondering if this isn't a lost opportunity by not leveraging something a little more modern like the matrix protocol (which is still decentralized)??

jayd16 9y ago

As someone who's worked with ejabberd I was about to suggest they're in for a headache but it looks like the peak player count for Eve Online is something like 65k users. They might not even have to cluster.

mickael 9y ago
Well, the most difficult part is to understand how the Erlang VM / Environment works. Once you have set it up, ejabberd just works. You can have massive scale and large uptime. This, ultimately, saves bigger headaches.
- jayd16 9y ago
  That's the promise but in my experience getting mnesia happy and keeping things clustered is huge pain for ops.
  - mickael 9y ago
    Well, in practice, it is more than a promise. You are not forced to use Mnesia. You can use other backends to simplify the ops. Yes, it is as simple and make managing the platform a breeze. You need to be as stateless as possible.

w0de0 9y ago

An interesting aside for the unfamiliar: Eve Online's server is a monolithic app built in Python 2.7 [0]. Anecdotally, it is a hellscape of spaghetti code, sparse documentation, and features whose implementation details are quite literally lost (in that no current maintainer knows how they work or where in the codebase they exist). 0 - https://www.eveonline.com/article/stackless-python-2.7/ https://www.eveonline.com/article/stackless-python-2.7/