4 ms·

I feel you, the tech space is way less exciting that it was decades ago. The last succesful communication standards are email, http and IRC. XMPP is succesful i

by boudin 5y ago

I feel you, the tech space is way less exciting that it was decades ago. The last succesful communication standards are email, http and IRC. XMPP is succesful in a way that it's used behind the scene in a good amount of apps, but that stops there. The only alternatives are good old phone calls or SMS. All what have been done since is to fragment communication as much as possible by jailing people in apps. I really hope Matrix will manage to disrupt this and change this momentum. Part of it though would be the ease of setting up a server and avoid the feature fragmentation of XMPP that could be hard to understand from a user point of view.

tonyoconnell 5y ago
I agree. It's not easy for the average user to setup a Matrix server, yet. With Conduit's light footprint soon we may be able to setup a server by simply downloading it from Google Play or the App Store. If the rest of the setup could be done through an easy to understand visual tool (including bridging between different messaging services) I expect Matrix to achieve a lot of traction. I'm worried though that the technology will be made illegal. The seven -- US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan, for example, said, "We urge industry to address our serious concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access to content .... We challenge the assertion that public safety cannot be protected without compromising privacy or cybersecurity." Bills in the US such as EARN IT (could eliminate P2P E2E messaging. The UK's GCHQ has come up with an idea called 'ghost protocol', which would add the government as a secret eavesdropper into every call. I understand and struggle with the good reasons why governments feel the need to do this. For example, as technology becomes more powerful it's not unrealistic to imagine a scenario that someday all it would take would be one crazy person to release a futuristic bio or nuclear weapon that would kill everyone in the world. I hope Matrix isn't hindered too much by the law. I guess there are backdoors built into the hardware and operating systems Matrix runs on, so the government can listen anyway. With E2E encryption at least Mark Zuckerburg won't be able to, though.
southerntofu 5y ago
> avoid the feature fragmentation Unfortunately Matrix and Jabber/XMPP are just as fragmented when it comes to client features. But both ecosystems are climbing the hill, on XMPP side there's now yearly "Compliance Suites" to help in this regard, i don't know the equivalent in the matrix ecosystem. Disclaimer: i'm part of the joinjabber.org project, and we're very interested in user/operator feedback and how to improve things overall, including interop with other networks
- boudin 5y ago
  I do run an xmpp server and use the Conversations app on Android (which is an app that every other messaging app should look at, it's just perfect). It definitely got much better but and is heading in the right direction, but to convince people to move over it needs to be really easy. That's the one thing that apps like whatsapp, signal or telegram provides, it's easy. Setting up a feature-full XMPP server is not that hard, but requires a good amount of admin still. Understanding the impact of choosing a client over another requires to have some basic knowledge of the protocol itself. For example, which XEP is supported by the client and the server. I do get that the extensibility of the protocol is really powerful, but it's also its weakness in my opinion, adding a complexity that is hard to understand for non tech users.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Agreed conversations is a great client! Speaking of which, are you aware the maintainers of conversations.im have paid offers for hosting your own domains? There's also other similar offers from different providers. Is that a step in the right direction in your view? > That's the one thing that apps like whatsapp, signal or telegram provides, it's easy. There's also the Snikket.org project which operates on an invitation principle (small server model). Any user on the server can send invites for new users, and they just click a few links to get started. Once again, feedback is welcome. > Understanding the impact of choosing a client over another requires to have some basic knowledge of the protocol itself. That's a big problem and that's actually one of the reasons we started the joinjabber.org project, to help people choose a server/client. Let us know if something is not clear or can be improved on there. Also worth mentioning, the Snikket project friendly-forks a bunch of clients to provide a consistent featureset/experience across platforms, as explained here: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
    - boudin 5y ago
      Definitely what Conversations author is doing is a big step in the right direction. I managed to convert some friend and one of my sibling to it. In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. I would expect that tech enthusiasts who really care about Internet's freedom as a whole to already have some level of self-hosting and knowledge to setup their own server (that's what I'm doing) Non tech users will not really expect to have to pay for a server, I think that most of them would only think of Instant messaging as the client app (a bit like for email). Maybe I'm saying crap because my knowledge of XMPP is very limited, but I would think that for XMPP to take on in the instant messaging space, it means that the protocol itself has to be focused on that. From there some form of versioning of the protocol that could mean that for a server or a client to be considered compatible with a version of the protocol, it needs to support a set of versioned XEP. I think that would make things easier for a people who are writing XMPP app to focus on a common set of goals.

by boudin 5y ago

tonyoconnell 5y ago

I agree. It's not easy for the average user to setup a Matrix server, yet. With Conduit's light footprint soon we may be able to setup a server by simply downloading it from Google Play or the App Store. If the rest of the setup could be done through an easy to understand visual tool (including bridging between different messaging services) I expect Matrix to achieve a lot of traction. I'm worried though that the technology will be made illegal. The seven -- US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan, for example, said, "We urge industry to address our serious concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access to content .... We challenge the assertion that public safety cannot be protected without compromising privacy or cybersecurity." Bills in the US such as EARN IT (could eliminate P2P E2E messaging. The UK's GCHQ has come up with an idea called 'ghost protocol', which would add the government as a secret eavesdropper into every call. I understand and struggle with the good reasons why governments feel the need to do this. For example, as technology becomes more powerful it's not unrealistic to imagine a scenario that someday all it would take would be one crazy person to release a futuristic bio or nuclear weapon that would kill everyone in the world. I hope Matrix isn't hindered too much by the law. I guess there are backdoors built into the hardware and operating systems Matrix runs on, so the government can listen anyway. With E2E encryption at least Mark Zuckerburg won't be able to, though.

southerntofu 5y ago

> avoid the feature fragmentation Unfortunately Matrix and Jabber/XMPP are just as fragmented when it comes to client features. But both ecosystems are climbing the hill, on XMPP side there's now yearly "Compliance Suites" to help in this regard, i don't know the equivalent in the matrix ecosystem. Disclaimer: i'm part of the joinjabber.org project, and we're very interested in user/operator feedback and how to improve things overall, including interop with other networks

boudin 5y ago
I do run an xmpp server and use the Conversations app on Android (which is an app that every other messaging app should look at, it's just perfect). It definitely got much better but and is heading in the right direction, but to convince people to move over it needs to be really easy. That's the one thing that apps like whatsapp, signal or telegram provides, it's easy. Setting up a feature-full XMPP server is not that hard, but requires a good amount of admin still. Understanding the impact of choosing a client over another requires to have some basic knowledge of the protocol itself. For example, which XEP is supported by the client and the server. I do get that the extensibility of the protocol is really powerful, but it's also its weakness in my opinion, adding a complexity that is hard to understand for non tech users.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Agreed conversations is a great client! Speaking of which, are you aware the maintainers of conversations.im have paid offers for hosting your own domains? There's also other similar offers from different providers. Is that a step in the right direction in your view? > That's the one thing that apps like whatsapp, signal or telegram provides, it's easy. There's also the Snikket.org project which operates on an invitation principle (small server model). Any user on the server can send invites for new users, and they just click a few links to get started. Once again, feedback is welcome. > Understanding the impact of choosing a client over another requires to have some basic knowledge of the protocol itself. That's a big problem and that's actually one of the reasons we started the joinjabber.org project, to help people choose a server/client. Let us know if something is not clear or can be improved on there. Also worth mentioning, the Snikket project friendly-forks a bunch of clients to provide a consistent featureset/experience across platforms, as explained here: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
  - boudin 5y ago
    Definitely what Conversations author is doing is a big step in the right direction. I managed to convert some friend and one of my sibling to it. In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. I would expect that tech enthusiasts who really care about Internet's freedom as a whole to already have some level of self-hosting and knowledge to setup their own server (that's what I'm doing) Non tech users will not really expect to have to pay for a server, I think that most of them would only think of Instant messaging as the client app (a bit like for email). Maybe I'm saying crap because my knowledge of XMPP is very limited, but I would think that for XMPP to take on in the instant messaging space, it means that the protocol itself has to be focused on that. From there some form of versioning of the protocol that could mean that for a server or a client to be considered compatible with a version of the protocol, it needs to support a set of versioned XEP. I think that would make things easier for a people who are writing XMPP app to focus on a common set of goals.