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> It would be nice if I could, say, post a picture or an emoji in one xmpp client and have it displayed in all other clients that are capable of sending emojis
by ATsch 5y ago
> It would be nice if I could, say, post a picture or an emoji in one xmpp client and have it displayed in all other clients that are capable of sending emojis and pictures.
I don't personally think multi-device will ever be solved in a satisfactory way in XMPP. Like IRC, the whole architecture is fundamentally based on relaying messages. This works great for desktop computers, but as you add more devices with more intermittent connectivity, it breaks down quickly as you need to resort to hacks like sending deltas to other devices as carbon copies, which may or may not be delivered or interpreted correctly by clients. To solve it you need to fundamentally rethink your protocol not as one that relays messages, but synchronizes history. This is extremely hard to do without breaking backwards compatibility as you basically need to rearchitect every part of the stack. Matrix is a notable open messaging standard that does this and although it has it's flaws, multi-device experience is not one of them.
I'd definitely welcome XMPP making improvements in this area, but I'm not personally optimistic it can be done in time considering the generally dwindling userbase.
- swiley 5y agoI run dino on both my phone and desktop and have zero problems with message carbons on both.
- aidenn0 5y agoJabber has almost completely solved this. TFA mentions how and notes the two places that have in-progress XEPs for improving (there's a race with MAC/Carbons where you have to either risk duplicate messages or dropping; current recommendation is to do the former and check for dupe). On top of this, by far the best client I've used for XMPP is Android-only (Conversations.im). I have no problem using Gajim on my desktop and Conversations on my phone, and I have an SMS/MMS bridge (jmp.chat) that lets me send even to people without jabber from it. Multi-device and mobile is the one place where XMPP is ahead of 99% of the other messages, and it works similarly well to Matrix in my limited experience with Matrix.
- ATsch 5y agoIn my experience (which was echoed by coworkers requests to resend messages, until we switched) there are a select few happy paths where it works reasonably well and a lot more where it doesn't. You seemed to agree with that in your original comment. In general the problems with XMPP are rarely with missing checkboxes or things that miraculously don't exist somewhere in the hundreds of accepted and in-progress XEPs, but the long tail of user experience in the real world.
- aidenn0 5y agoLinux desktop clients not named "gajim" were very slow to adopt Carbons as the delivery method. And in Gajim you needed to enable a plugin. Things were very bad in the transition period (which ended about 5 years ago?). At work we setup a jabber server for a small group of about 6 people and then more people started using it. It was running an ejabberd that was too old to support carbons. Once it became clear that some sort of IM solution was wanted, we came up with a list of features. Upgrading ejabberd and recommending proper clients fixed every box except "iOS client with push notifications" (XMPP didn't at the time support out-of-band push notifications, it does now).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Zash 5y agoDo you have a source for "generally dwindling userbase" ?
- Lammy 5y agoDoes living through it count? :) Once Upon A Time every GMail user was also an XMPP user.
- SamWhited 5y agoAnd now every Zoom and Whatsapp and meet.jit.si user is. This sort of thing didn't really go away, companies just decided to construct walled gardens instead of federate.
- telesilla 5y agoWhat server is Zoom and Whatsapp using? Their volume must be so intense I'm fascinated to know how they do XMPP for so many.
- SamWhited 5y agoWhatsApp used to be ejabberd, IIRC, but I'm sure they're both their own thing now. FunXMPP is WhatsApp's weird non-standard compression mechanism. Basically they took XMPP and replaced eg. <message> with <m> to save a few bytes, but it's been a while since I looked into it, it may do more now.
- telesilla 5y agoWhatsapp: seems they built their own called FunXMPP. Zoom, I'm not sure yet.
- ATsch 5y agoNot really. I can't easily find any statistics, but I just based it on the fact that a few years ago roughly half of my techy friends used XMPP. Many ran their own servers and all of the clubs had one. The work one had hundreds of users online at all times. Today all of these numbers are zero. Roughly split 40/40/20 between telegram, matrix and discord.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoWe (Xabber) have actually solved this. For me iOS (upcoming version), Web and Android (internal beta) clients sync no worse than Telegram.