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Discord is really good, I would drag people to federated open alternatives if it were good. Zulip looks, feels, and runs kinda okay overall. I could probably do

Discord is really good, I would drag people to federated open alternatives if it were good. Zulip looks, feels, and runs kinda okay overall. I could probably do it well if it were my job, the stuff Discord does well is in my wheelhouse. I want to get off of it because of the PRC connection, but it's where the community is at for now. XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging.

brunoqc 6y ago
Yeah Discord is really well-made. That's why I didn't tell that it was shit and that open source is better. It's just that maybe it would help if cool people used the open source one. It would give them visibility, more bug reports, more pull requests, more donations. Matrix isn't bad. Sure it's better to host your own server right now since their main one is often overloaded. And the UX stuff is getting better and the p2p changes should be awesome.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  Matrix for HOPE was solid as hell.
  - jrwr 6y ago
    From the backend of it (I was on the team for it) Even with our "light" load, Matrix/Riot is a overbloated product overall. To handle the scale of Defcon would require hardware I don't think exists
    - n010n3 6y ago
      I ran the Matrix server for HOPE and have fairly extensive experience administrating Matrix. For HOPE, we didn't even begin to approach anything that looked like capacity; any resources that were maxing out were either due to the DoS attack we were enduring (and made numerous changes to mitigate) during the conf, or applications in different threads that matrix metrics were picking up on (bug filed, will fixed in new versions). Even so, we could easily - without a sweat - get 2000 people on a server. I wasn't even using more workers than we had cores. Make that a bigger box and you get a few thousand more. Then use a few different servers that are federated with each other for DEFCON and you have instant scale. The matrix.org people run the matrix.org homeserver for over ~200k active users. You can see an outdated version of the stats here: https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status and they've said their active userbase has grown 300% in the past year. The original plan for HOPE was to run multiple homeservers, but we didn't even begin to need to.
      - brunoqc 6y ago
        Also soonish, we'll have dendrite (go) and conduit (rust). EDIT: And eventually p2p which might change everything.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      The matrix.org server deployment handles around 100K concurrent users these days across ~4M rooms, with ~30Hz of messages in and ~3000Hz of messages out - and these days has average traffic send time under 100ms. DEFCON should be trivial by comparison, and as others have said, the HOPE server (2500 users or so) was a resounding success - so much so that it’s been set up as permenant fixture now post conference. Now, it’s true that the Synapse server implementation has to be tuned - for large userbases you need worker processors and to dial up the caches a bit. And needless to say you need postgres rather than sqlite. Kinda depressing that nobody from DEFCON synced with the Matrix team (to my knowledge) on how best to do this, rather than just writing it off as slow and bloated.
sneak 6y ago
Discord’s TOS prohibits, among other things, the posting of political cartoons, even in DM. You are not allowed to use the service to ridicule anyone.
- vecplane 6y ago
  That sounds preposterous. Do you have more info on this? EDIT: From the Discord TOS - https://discord.com/new/terms https://discord.com/new/terms As an example, you agree not to use the Service in order to: - post, upload, transmit or otherwise disseminate information that is objectionable as outlined in our Community Guidelines; - defame, libel, ridicule, mock, stalk, threaten, harass, intimidate or abuse anyone; - engage in conduct that is fraudulent or illegal or otherwise harmful to Discord or any other user; - ... Also from the community guidelines - https://discord.com/new/guidelines https://discord.com/new/guidelines Here are some rules for interacting with others: - Do not organize, participate in, or encourage harassment of others. Disagreements happen and are normal, but continuous, repetitive, or severe negative comments may cross the line into harassment and are not okay. - Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities. - ...
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Did you notice the part where you can't use alternative clients and Discord scans all your messages?
  - gruez 6y ago
    I'm guessing it's this clause? >Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities I can definietly imagine some religious people claiming to be "attacked" by a political cartoon, eg. the charlie hebdo cartoon
    - 6y ago
jtvjan 6y ago
>XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging. Could you elaborate? I'm curious as to why you think that.
- hyakosm 6y ago
  XMPP works with a lot of extensions (XEP), used for things like file transfers, avatars, alerts... and every client implements different XEP... so the interoperability is non-existent.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Eh, there are discovery mechanisms for which features are supported by which server/client. The biggest problem with XMPP, is that it's really confusing and has a steep learning curve. The barrier for someone to get into XMPP as a developer is quite high, unfortunately. There are libraries like Smack that makes it a lot easier to use, but to understand it... that's something entirely different. The abundance of XEP's doesn't help, and like you mentioned, everyone implements their own XEP based on their interpretations - right or wrong. There's also a lot of peculiarities with XMPP that aren't expected in a modern world, such as offline messaging and multi-device messaging (receiving messages on both your phone and desktop simultaneously). XMPP was never intended to support these things. Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability. With all that said - we drove an XMPP Server (Openfire) and clients within our company for well over a decade. For that use - it's amazing.
    - upofadown 6y ago
      >Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability. That is no longer true in practice...
  - e12e 6y ago
    While the various xep might be a confounding factor - the biggest issue I see today with xmmp is that end to end encryption and perfect forward secrecy is optional and bolted on. I think Facebook and Google's embrace-extend-extinguish (both fb messenger/chat and gtalk used xmpp - neither allowed federation - and created artificial silos) was probably the worst thing for open standard chat. Gmail isn't quite big enough to have been able to fracture email yet - but not for lack of trying (years of poor imap support, strange handling of threads/top-posting etc).
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Sigh, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't realise Discord also had strong ties to Tencent. I really avoid it anyway as I'm already on WAY too many chat apps. But some communities like the one for Home Assistant are really strongly into it.
na85 6y ago
>Discord is really good It's not good. It kills the battery on my pixel 3 in less than 18 hours if I use it. Under no circumstances can such an app be described as "really good".

brunoqc 6y ago

Yeah Discord is really well-made. That's why I didn't tell that it was shit and that open source is better. It's just that maybe it would help if cool people used the open source one. It would give them visibility, more bug reports, more pull requests, more donations. Matrix isn't bad. Sure it's better to host your own server right now since their main one is often overloaded. And the UX stuff is getting better and the p2p changes should be awesome.

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
Matrix for HOPE was solid as hell.
- jrwr 6y ago
  From the backend of it (I was on the team for it) Even with our "light" load, Matrix/Riot is a overbloated product overall. To handle the scale of Defcon would require hardware I don't think exists
  - n010n3 6y ago
    I ran the Matrix server for HOPE and have fairly extensive experience administrating Matrix. For HOPE, we didn't even begin to approach anything that looked like capacity; any resources that were maxing out were either due to the DoS attack we were enduring (and made numerous changes to mitigate) during the conf, or applications in different threads that matrix metrics were picking up on (bug filed, will fixed in new versions). Even so, we could easily - without a sweat - get 2000 people on a server. I wasn't even using more workers than we had cores. Make that a bigger box and you get a few thousand more. Then use a few different servers that are federated with each other for DEFCON and you have instant scale. The matrix.org people run the matrix.org homeserver for over ~200k active users. You can see an outdated version of the stats here: https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status and they've said their active userbase has grown 300% in the past year. The original plan for HOPE was to run multiple homeservers, but we didn't even begin to need to.
    - brunoqc 6y ago
      Also soonish, we'll have dendrite (go) and conduit (rust). EDIT: And eventually p2p which might change everything.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    The matrix.org server deployment handles around 100K concurrent users these days across ~4M rooms, with ~30Hz of messages in and ~3000Hz of messages out - and these days has average traffic send time under 100ms. DEFCON should be trivial by comparison, and as others have said, the HOPE server (2500 users or so) was a resounding success - so much so that it’s been set up as permenant fixture now post conference. Now, it’s true that the Synapse server implementation has to be tuned - for large userbases you need worker processors and to dial up the caches a bit. And needless to say you need postgres rather than sqlite. Kinda depressing that nobody from DEFCON synced with the Matrix team (to my knowledge) on how best to do this, rather than just writing it off as slow and bloated.

sneak 6y ago

Discord’s TOS prohibits, among other things, the posting of political cartoons, even in DM. You are not allowed to use the service to ridicule anyone.

vecplane 6y ago
That sounds preposterous. Do you have more info on this? EDIT: From the Discord TOS - https://discord.com/new/terms https://discord.com/new/terms As an example, you agree not to use the Service in order to: - post, upload, transmit or otherwise disseminate information that is objectionable as outlined in our Community Guidelines; - defame, libel, ridicule, mock, stalk, threaten, harass, intimidate or abuse anyone; - engage in conduct that is fraudulent or illegal or otherwise harmful to Discord or any other user; - ... Also from the community guidelines - https://discord.com/new/guidelines https://discord.com/new/guidelines Here are some rules for interacting with others: - Do not organize, participate in, or encourage harassment of others. Disagreements happen and are normal, but continuous, repetitive, or severe negative comments may cross the line into harassment and are not okay. - Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities. - ...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Did you notice the part where you can't use alternative clients and Discord scans all your messages?
- gruez 6y ago
  I'm guessing it's this clause? >Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities I can definietly imagine some religious people claiming to be "attacked" by a political cartoon, eg. the charlie hebdo cartoon
  - 6y ago

jtvjan 6y ago

>XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging. Could you elaborate? I'm curious as to why you think that.

hyakosm 6y ago
XMPP works with a lot of extensions (XEP), used for things like file transfers, avatars, alerts... and every client implements different XEP... so the interoperability is non-existent.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Eh, there are discovery mechanisms for which features are supported by which server/client. The biggest problem with XMPP, is that it's really confusing and has a steep learning curve. The barrier for someone to get into XMPP as a developer is quite high, unfortunately. There are libraries like Smack that makes it a lot easier to use, but to understand it... that's something entirely different. The abundance of XEP's doesn't help, and like you mentioned, everyone implements their own XEP based on their interpretations - right or wrong. There's also a lot of peculiarities with XMPP that aren't expected in a modern world, such as offline messaging and multi-device messaging (receiving messages on both your phone and desktop simultaneously). XMPP was never intended to support these things. Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability. With all that said - we drove an XMPP Server (Openfire) and clients within our company for well over a decade. For that use - it's amazing.
  - upofadown 6y ago
    >Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability. That is no longer true in practice...
- e12e 6y ago
  While the various xep might be a confounding factor - the biggest issue I see today with xmmp is that end to end encryption and perfect forward secrecy is optional and bolted on. I think Facebook and Google's embrace-extend-extinguish (both fb messenger/chat and gtalk used xmpp - neither allowed federation - and created artificial silos) was probably the worst thing for open standard chat. Gmail isn't quite big enough to have been able to fracture email yet - but not for lack of trying (years of poor imap support, strange handling of threads/top-posting etc).

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Sigh, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't realise Discord also had strong ties to Tencent. I really avoid it anyway as I'm already on WAY too many chat apps. But some communities like the one for Home Assistant are really strongly into it.

na85 6y ago

>Discord is really good It's not good. It kills the battery on my pixel 3 in less than 18 hours if I use it. Under no circumstances can such an app be described as "really good".