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XMPP self hoster here. I've been revisiting moving to self hosted Matrix around every 4 months now for 2 years, and every single time I failed. The reasons va

by pmlnr 7y ago

XMPP self hoster here. I've been revisiting moving to self hosted Matrix around every 4 months now for 2 years, and every single time I failed. The reasons vary; initially synapse refused to work, then I got stuck trying to set up a multi-domain service. That said, this document verifies what I feared in the background: what matrix offers as self-hosted is too simple to be true, and thus it's no surprising I never got it completely running. XMPP has it's own issues, but when I self host it, it's there, nowhere else. No identity servers, no push servers, no jitsi servers in the background. It seems like I'm going to be with XMPP for a much longer time.

phicoh 7y ago
My experience is that synapse is not harder than ejabberd (I don't have experience with other XMPP servers) Matrix tries to do a lot more than XMPP. In my experience, people find XMPP too limiting, so they don't use it.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  > Matrix tries to do a lot more than XMPP It's not that simple. Many doesn't know about omemo, jingle, etc, when it comes to xmpp. Or xmpp bridges like biboumi. Matrix is is doing the same thing, but on differrent - and way more complicated - infrastructure ideas. Prosody is definitely much simpler to configure, even with multiple domains, especially when per domain specific setting are needed.
  - phicoh 7y ago
    The problem with omemo, jingle, etc. is that you have makes sure that the XMPP components you use support them. It would be fine if all popular implementations support those features, but that's not the case. So you can't just say, let's use XMPP. You have to be very specific and make sure people use the right versions. You can say that Prosody is easy. I don't find the following list easy: https://prosody.im/doc/modules https://prosody.im/doc/modules And you probably need 'Component "conference.example.org" "muc"' for any kind of 'room' support. The the next question, does prosody have the equivent of federated rooms in matrix. Here is a list of XMPP extensions in the documentation: https://www.prosody.im/doc/xeplist https://www.prosody.im/doc/xeplist I guess the answer is, there are no federated rooms in prosody. Another question is whether it is possible to send someone an XMPP message when that person is offline. I have no idea how to search for that.
    - jgtrosh 7y ago
      It seems that some people that host XMPP servers should select a set of required extensions with specific versions and give the whole thing a name and version and use that in lieu of “XMPP”. Likewise, clients would need to provide and claim compatibility with the extended XMPP. Has this not been done before?
    - Boulth 7y ago
      No federated rooms. Offline messages are supported. I guess newer Prosody supports this and much more out of the box but the generic configuration instructions I used are here: https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-modules-do-i-need-to-support-conversations https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-module... > The problem with omemo, jingle, etc. is that you have makes sure that the XMPP components you use support them. It would be fine if all popular implementations support those features, but that's not the case. Isn't this also the case with Matrix that no implementations except the official ones support E2E encryption?
      - derin 7y ago
        > Isn't this also the case with Matrix that no implementations except the official ones support E2E encryption? A general purpose project to provide all clients with E2E encryption is being developed (and is usable right now): https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon Right now it runs as a daemon on a user's local machine.
      - phicoh 7y ago
        Just curious, which XEP is offline messages? In Matrix, clients are supposed to implement the full Client-Server API. If a client leaves out e2e then it cannot claim to implement the matrix protocol. Given that 1.0 of the full matrix protocol was published only a few days ago, it makes sense that anything other than the official implementations are behind. E2e in the official implementation is not that old either. Even the official implementations need some work to be useful. For example, cross device signing is not there yet.
        7y ago

by pmlnr 7y ago

phicoh 7y ago

My experience is that synapse is not harder than ejabberd (I don't have experience with other XMPP servers) Matrix tries to do a lot more than XMPP. In my experience, people find XMPP too limiting, so they don't use it.

pmlnr 7y ago
> Matrix tries to do a lot more than XMPP It's not that simple. Many doesn't know about omemo, jingle, etc, when it comes to xmpp. Or xmpp bridges like biboumi. Matrix is is doing the same thing, but on differrent - and way more complicated - infrastructure ideas. Prosody is definitely much simpler to configure, even with multiple domains, especially when per domain specific setting are needed.
- phicoh 7y ago
  The problem with omemo, jingle, etc. is that you have makes sure that the XMPP components you use support them. It would be fine if all popular implementations support those features, but that's not the case. So you can't just say, let's use XMPP. You have to be very specific and make sure people use the right versions. You can say that Prosody is easy. I don't find the following list easy: https://prosody.im/doc/modules https://prosody.im/doc/modules And you probably need 'Component "conference.example.org" "muc"' for any kind of 'room' support. The the next question, does prosody have the equivent of federated rooms in matrix. Here is a list of XMPP extensions in the documentation: https://www.prosody.im/doc/xeplist https://www.prosody.im/doc/xeplist I guess the answer is, there are no federated rooms in prosody. Another question is whether it is possible to send someone an XMPP message when that person is offline. I have no idea how to search for that.
  - jgtrosh 7y ago
    It seems that some people that host XMPP servers should select a set of required extensions with specific versions and give the whole thing a name and version and use that in lieu of “XMPP”. Likewise, clients would need to provide and claim compatibility with the extended XMPP. Has this not been done before?
  - Boulth 7y ago
    No federated rooms. Offline messages are supported. I guess newer Prosody supports this and much more out of the box but the generic configuration instructions I used are here: https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-modules-do-i-need-to-support-conversations https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-module... > The problem with omemo, jingle, etc. is that you have makes sure that the XMPP components you use support them. It would be fine if all popular implementations support those features, but that's not the case. Isn't this also the case with Matrix that no implementations except the official ones support E2E encryption?
    - derin 7y ago
      > Isn't this also the case with Matrix that no implementations except the official ones support E2E encryption? A general purpose project to provide all clients with E2E encryption is being developed (and is usable right now): https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon Right now it runs as a daemon on a user's local machine.
    - phicoh 7y ago
      Just curious, which XEP is offline messages? In Matrix, clients are supposed to implement the full Client-Server API. If a client leaves out e2e then it cannot claim to implement the matrix protocol. Given that 1.0 of the full matrix protocol was published only a few days ago, it makes sense that anything other than the official implementations are behind. E2e in the official implementation is not that old either. Even the official implementations need some work to be useful. For example, cross device signing is not there yet.
      - 7y ago