4 ms·

Although most of my friends prefer Matrix these days, XMPP is still my favorite way of chatting. You can easily run your own Prosody instance [1] on a $5/month

Although most of my friends prefer Matrix these days, XMPP is still my favorite way of chatting. You can easily run your own Prosody instance [1] on a $5/month VPS and have a very modern chat experience - offline messages, syncing between devices, OMEMO end-to-end encryption, group chats, push notifications, HTTP file upload, etc. My wife and I use it for all our communications. There are some great clients for Android [2], iOS [3] and Linux/Windows [4] that support all the modern XEPs. Sadly, there aren't any mature, actively developed clients for OS X that I've found. Adium is pretty much abandoned. Monal is in active development though and seems promising. It's so nice to use an open protocol with native clients. Most other self-hosted chat solutions require electron apps, which can be painful to use unless you have top of the line hardware. [1] https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted/blob/master/roles/prosody/templates/prosody.cfg.lua.j2 https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted/blob/master/roles/... [2] https://conversations.im/ https://conversations.im/ [3] https://chatsecure.org/ https://chatsecure.org/ [4] https://gajim.org https://gajim.org

sweden 8y ago
"Easily" and "modern" chat experience with XMPP? I used to run my own Prosody server for some years before switching out to Matrix and there was nothing "easy" and "modern" with XMPP. Sure, I could get the fancy features such as end-to-end encryption, push notifications and file sharing... with Conversation for Android. But I could never properly sync my messages and conversations with a PC client. I'm glad I don't have to deal with XMPP anymore, I know that the HN crowd likes to dream with it but the reality is that it was a major pain.
- perlgod 8y ago
  All those things work fine with Gajim. Probably not the case with other desktop clients though admittedly.
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  > it was a major pain It demonstrated that it can overcome major pain points though: Gajim (Desktop), Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS) [edit to add: and conversejs on the web] cooperate quite well these days. Matrix? Let's see how they overcome their first major paradigm shift (such as the introduction of mobile devices with spotty ever-changing network environments, or E2E encryption both of which took a while for XMPP to handle gracefully)
  - dasyatidprime 8y ago
    E2E hasn't come gracefully to me yet, because my Pidgin still only has OTR support, and so does the one one of my primary Jabber contacts uses, except Conversations has now dropped it in favor of going all-OMEMO. My current answer is to ignore the mobile case like I did most of the time before, but that's not a good answer. I guess maybe I need to switch to Gajim, but this sure isn't frictionless, mostly due to the lag-induced fragmentation.
    - elagost 8y ago
      Pidgin has OMEMO support. https://github.com/gkdr/lurch https://github.com/gkdr/lurch This works fairly well for me.
      - dasyatidprime 8y ago
        I know you mean well, and I'm glad this exists and that you reminded me of it (I now remember having seen it before), but this isn't enough to invalidate my point. The installation instructions are… barely okay. AUR… okay, I guess. What would people on Debian-based platforms, like the very popular Ubuntu, do? Compile from source? Let's see what the README says: “I know this is a bit clunky, but using the command interface for interactions makes the plugin usable in clients that do not have a GUI.” So now I get to explain this to the other people I was using Pidgin+OTR with too, right? (Also I get to have to remember what the commands are, because I won't be using them frequently.) I mean, this can also be phrased as one of the disadvantages of being part of the earlier installed base, but on a wider scale, buildup of legacy resistance is one of the things that you wind up having to overcome if you want to introduce new features that aren't strictly optional—which is kind of why we still don't really have secure email that doesn't take massive cognitive overhead in “remembering which things people are using” and massive social overhead in negotiating about it and being prepared for all sorts of responses. (Added:) And to make sure I'm not accidentally taking this into the weeds, the incompatibility was introduced AFAIK when Conversations dropped OTR. That means any Pidgin clusters suddenly take on a big UI and polish downgrade for their E2E if they want to stay interoperable. I'm not meaning to criticize this specific plugin so much as to point out that there wasn't enough overall coordination between seemingly-major clients to stop this from happening.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
edhelas 8y ago
I'd like to add Movim to the list :) It's a self-hosted web client for small groups/businesses/schools fully built on XMPP. https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/

sweden 8y ago

"Easily" and "modern" chat experience with XMPP? I used to run my own Prosody server for some years before switching out to Matrix and there was nothing "easy" and "modern" with XMPP. Sure, I could get the fancy features such as end-to-end encryption, push notifications and file sharing... with Conversation for Android. But I could never properly sync my messages and conversations with a PC client. I'm glad I don't have to deal with XMPP anymore, I know that the HN crowd likes to dream with it but the reality is that it was a major pain.

perlgod 8y ago
All those things work fine with Gajim. Probably not the case with other desktop clients though admittedly.
pgeorgi 8y ago
> it was a major pain It demonstrated that it can overcome major pain points though: Gajim (Desktop), Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS) [edit to add: and conversejs on the web] cooperate quite well these days. Matrix? Let's see how they overcome their first major paradigm shift (such as the introduction of mobile devices with spotty ever-changing network environments, or E2E encryption both of which took a while for XMPP to handle gracefully)
- dasyatidprime 8y ago
  E2E hasn't come gracefully to me yet, because my Pidgin still only has OTR support, and so does the one one of my primary Jabber contacts uses, except Conversations has now dropped it in favor of going all-OMEMO. My current answer is to ignore the mobile case like I did most of the time before, but that's not a good answer. I guess maybe I need to switch to Gajim, but this sure isn't frictionless, mostly due to the lag-induced fragmentation.
  - elagost 8y ago
    Pidgin has OMEMO support. https://github.com/gkdr/lurch https://github.com/gkdr/lurch This works fairly well for me.
    - dasyatidprime 8y ago
      I know you mean well, and I'm glad this exists and that you reminded me of it (I now remember having seen it before), but this isn't enough to invalidate my point. The installation instructions are… barely okay. AUR… okay, I guess. What would people on Debian-based platforms, like the very popular Ubuntu, do? Compile from source? Let's see what the README says: “I know this is a bit clunky, but using the command interface for interactions makes the plugin usable in clients that do not have a GUI.” So now I get to explain this to the other people I was using Pidgin+OTR with too, right? (Also I get to have to remember what the commands are, because I won't be using them frequently.) I mean, this can also be phrased as one of the disadvantages of being part of the earlier installed base, but on a wider scale, buildup of legacy resistance is one of the things that you wind up having to overcome if you want to introduce new features that aren't strictly optional—which is kind of why we still don't really have secure email that doesn't take massive cognitive overhead in “remembering which things people are using” and massive social overhead in negotiating about it and being prepared for all sorts of responses. (Added:) And to make sure I'm not accidentally taking this into the weeds, the incompatibility was introduced AFAIK when Conversations dropped OTR. That means any Pidgin clusters suddenly take on a big UI and polish downgrade for their E2E if they want to stay interoperable. I'm not meaning to criticize this specific plugin so much as to point out that there wasn't enough overall coordination between seemingly-major clients to stop this from happening.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

edhelas 8y ago

I'd like to add Movim to the list :) It's a self-hosted web client for small groups/businesses/schools fully built on XMPP. https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/