4 ms·

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

by rglullis 3y ago

rapsey 3y ago
i.e. moving the goalpost fallacy.
- rglullis 3y ago
  My goal is "let's have a communication protocol that is secure, enables applications with modern features on all major platforms and is not controlled by any single entity". If not for the last point, I'd be using WhatsApp just fine. But because of it, Matrix/Element is currently the best we have. Is it great? Absolutely not, but it is the best we have at the moment, and to call it a "trashfire" without putting things in perspective is a disservice.
  - rakoo 3y ago
    Interestingly Delta Chat kind of fits the bill thanks to their investigation of webxdc, i.e. mini apps that run entirely within the chat and never connect to the outside world, only with peers in the chat: https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ I can't say if this is the future, but I like it taking another direction. Taking a few steps back, this model solves a lot of problems with a very easy UX for beginners: shared calendar, shared expenses, shared notes can all happen inside your chat, which is naturally the place where you already share stuff with people, but now it can be more without any server installation or anything.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
I find that XMPP interoperability (terrible as it is) is still just miles ahead of Matrix. For all intents and purposes Element controls the protocol and despite that I almost constantly find friction communicating the client for Android and the desktop Electron-based client. With 3rd party clients it is a nightmare.
- rglullis 3y ago
  When https://siskin.im/ https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you? Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    No, I don't have any problem about claiming interoperability in this context as it is completely orthogonal. You could also claim that not having animated gifs also makes it unusable for 99% of the population (an statement I might even agree with) and it would be irrelevant to interoperability. iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" if anything most likely reduces your interoperability. You should be realistic and consider that there is no point to any "E2EE" messaging solution on iOS as _by construction_ all the metadata (at the very least) is going to be leaked to Apple (and they in turn will leak that to the authorities, as was pointed in HN quite recently), precisely by the push notifications crap you'd be forced to adopt as part of the pants lowering requiered to support iOS.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      > iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" We can be here grandstanding and dismissing other people's choices or we can be pragmatic and find ways to grow the alternative networks to the point where the "mainstream" can no longer ignore it. If you want to continue using XMPP, great. But those that are on Apple are not going to drop their beloved iDevices just because we are telling them how cool XMPP is. Your inflexibility will do nothing but keep you isolated and able to talk with a handful of other people that are stubborn as you. However, if you let yourself accept that encouraging other people to adopt Matrix will at the same time (a) bring progress to those on iOS and (b) increase the utility of your own XMPP server, as now there will be more people being able to reach you through a bridge.
upofadown 3y ago
The big usability issue with Signal is that it has a dark pattern that leads to most users using it without verifying that they are actually talking to who they think they are talking to. If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. The 7 emojis seen in the linked article are arguably better but a short decimal number would have been good too and would have eliminated the issue that the emojis don't look the same. Neither seems to provide any sort of conceptual framework to allow the user to react in a reasonable way when something goes wrong with the identity stuff... OMEMO running over XMPP is pretty terrible for identity stuff, at least for the clients I have encountered.
- hiq 3y ago
  > If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. Why wouldn't you scan the QR code instead of doing that?
  - upofadown 3y ago
    You can if both devices are phones and you are physically in the same location. Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that. In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot.
    - hiq 3y ago
      > Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that. If you're not in the same location, you can long press the code in Signal and "compare to clipboard". > In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot. I think that's a generic remark about this though, that applies to all messengers AFAIK. Whether that's a 4-digit code and 60.
      - upofadown 3y ago
        I am not sure how you would get the 60 digits from the other person in your clipboard. My point is that users should have the chance to know what they are doing. There seems to be a tendency to deliberately keep them in the dark. A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudflare. Once you've done that you just install Conversations (from F-Droid, of course) and something like Gajim or Dino-im on your laptops and you'll bask in the glory of evading the surveillance dragnet because you're using OMEMO encryption which works end-to-end. If you happen to have Jitsi Meet installed you'll already have an XMPP server up and running to which you can add some configuration to make it useable for this purpose. Source: this is what I've been doing for many years
- rglullis 3y ago
  Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation. I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.
  - MattJ100 3y ago
    Did you try it? What were the pain points?
    - rglullis 3y ago
      The first time I did this exercise was in 2018 (when I first set up an XMPP server and Matrix Synapse for Communick) and there simply wasn't any working iOS app. Monal was the only app I found and managed to install for him. It did chat only and would crash. I do not recall to get e2ee working and the fact that it is optional made things confusing even for me - e.g, I wasn't able to switch between a desktop client and Conversations easily. Element (then called riot.im) managed to do text, audio and video calls. The app had some bugs, but nothing that would block me from calling each other. The UX can still be confusing and I have occasional conversations where my father complains he can not hear me, most of them caused by my father not knowing that kept the video call but switched to the internal phone speaker instead of the external one. I heard about Siskin some months ago. Honestly, I haven't tried it yet. It might be that is fully functional, but the UI is so bare that there is no way that I'll be able to convince my father to switch to it. He still complains that he'd rather use WhatsApp like everyone else, so whatever XMPP brings now will be a case of "too little, too late".
tetraca 3y ago
Having set up and administrated both an XMPP and a Matrix server, XMPP is way less a pain in the ass. I've enjoyed dealing with prosody much more than either synapse or dendrite. XMPP doesn't tank my server every time I try to join a new room and it doesn't take forever to start talking in a room after you join it. And provided you're running the server, getting people onto XMPP has not been hard in my experience. I made a basic registration page with simple instructions. I have gotten people with low technical know-how to successfully register accounts and use it without issue. They just create an account, enter their username into a client I recommend, and they're ready to go (I've never even had them complain about OMEMO).
- rglullis 3y ago
  If you go through your contact list right now, how many people are on iOS, and how many of them do you think you could successfully convince to use XMPP as the primary method to reach you? With Matrix, I don't need to convince them.
  - zaik 3y ago
    Monal on iOS has made it quite easy to convince people to contact me via XMPP. Right now I have 31 XMPP contacts and 1 Matrix contact.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Your about page: Interests: XMPP, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata. Nice, I'd like to be friends with you. But do you realize that maybe, just maybe, you are facing a bit of availability bias?
      - zaik 3y ago
        Oh sure, but it's still a counterexample to your statement. I can convince people to use XMPP, and almost nobody is using Matrix if you don't do the convincing.
rakoo 3y ago
I did it no later than Yesterday: - Install Conversations on Android - In a prompt, there's a "create an account", I create one (it's with conversations.im) - I have an account - At this point there's a slight confusion between "what discussions are happening" and "what discussions do you know about", but I manage to find a room to a discussion I'm interested in - Get in, see the messages The experience is definitely 100x nicer
- rglullis 3y ago
  OP was on iOS.
  - binarymax 3y ago
    They were on both iOS and their Mac

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

rapsey 3y ago

i.e. moving the goalpost fallacy.

rglullis 3y ago
My goal is "let's have a communication protocol that is secure, enables applications with modern features on all major platforms and is not controlled by any single entity". If not for the last point, I'd be using WhatsApp just fine. But because of it, Matrix/Element is currently the best we have. Is it great? Absolutely not, but it is the best we have at the moment, and to call it a "trashfire" without putting things in perspective is a disservice.
- rakoo 3y ago
  Interestingly Delta Chat kind of fits the bill thanks to their investigation of webxdc, i.e. mini apps that run entirely within the chat and never connect to the outside world, only with peers in the chat: https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ I can't say if this is the future, but I like it taking another direction. Taking a few steps back, this model solves a lot of problems with a very easy UX for beginners: shared calendar, shared expenses, shared notes can all happen inside your chat, which is naturally the place where you already share stuff with people, but now it can be more without any server installation or anything.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

I find that XMPP interoperability (terrible as it is) is still just miles ahead of Matrix. For all intents and purposes Element controls the protocol and despite that I almost constantly find friction communicating the client for Android and the desktop Electron-based client. With 3rd party clients it is a nightmare.

rglullis 3y ago
When https://siskin.im/ https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you? Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  No, I don't have any problem about claiming interoperability in this context as it is completely orthogonal. You could also claim that not having animated gifs also makes it unusable for 99% of the population (an statement I might even agree with) and it would be irrelevant to interoperability. iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" if anything most likely reduces your interoperability. You should be realistic and consider that there is no point to any "E2EE" messaging solution on iOS as _by construction_ all the metadata (at the very least) is going to be leaked to Apple (and they in turn will leak that to the authorities, as was pointed in HN quite recently), precisely by the push notifications crap you'd be forced to adopt as part of the pants lowering requiered to support iOS.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    > iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" We can be here grandstanding and dismissing other people's choices or we can be pragmatic and find ways to grow the alternative networks to the point where the "mainstream" can no longer ignore it. If you want to continue using XMPP, great. But those that are on Apple are not going to drop their beloved iDevices just because we are telling them how cool XMPP is. Your inflexibility will do nothing but keep you isolated and able to talk with a handful of other people that are stubborn as you. However, if you let yourself accept that encouraging other people to adopt Matrix will at the same time (a) bring progress to those on iOS and (b) increase the utility of your own XMPP server, as now there will be more people being able to reach you through a bridge.

upofadown 3y ago

The big usability issue with Signal is that it has a dark pattern that leads to most users using it without verifying that they are actually talking to who they think they are talking to. If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. The 7 emojis seen in the linked article are arguably better but a short decimal number would have been good too and would have eliminated the issue that the emojis don't look the same. Neither seems to provide any sort of conceptual framework to allow the user to react in a reasonable way when something goes wrong with the identity stuff... OMEMO running over XMPP is pretty terrible for identity stuff, at least for the clients I have encountered.

hiq 3y ago
> If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. Why wouldn't you scan the QR code instead of doing that?
- upofadown 3y ago
  You can if both devices are phones and you are physically in the same location. Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that. In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot.
  - hiq 3y ago
    > Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that. If you're not in the same location, you can long press the code in Signal and "compare to clipboard". > In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot. I think that's a generic remark about this though, that applies to all messengers AFAIK. Whether that's a 4-digit code and 60.
    - upofadown 3y ago
      I am not sure how you would get the 60 digits from the other person in your clipboard. My point is that users should have the chance to know what they are doing. There seems to be a tendency to deliberately keep them in the dark. A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.

the_third_wave 3y ago

Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudflare. Once you've done that you just install Conversations (from F-Droid, of course) and something like Gajim or Dino-im on your laptops and you'll bask in the glory of evading the surveillance dragnet because you're using OMEMO encryption which works end-to-end. If you happen to have Jitsi Meet installed you'll already have an XMPP server up and running to which you can add some configuration to make it useable for this purpose. Source: this is what I've been doing for many years

rglullis 3y ago
Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation. I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.
- MattJ100 3y ago
  Did you try it? What were the pain points?
  - rglullis 3y ago
    The first time I did this exercise was in 2018 (when I first set up an XMPP server and Matrix Synapse for Communick) and there simply wasn't any working iOS app. Monal was the only app I found and managed to install for him. It did chat only and would crash. I do not recall to get e2ee working and the fact that it is optional made things confusing even for me - e.g, I wasn't able to switch between a desktop client and Conversations easily. Element (then called riot.im) managed to do text, audio and video calls. The app had some bugs, but nothing that would block me from calling each other. The UX can still be confusing and I have occasional conversations where my father complains he can not hear me, most of them caused by my father not knowing that kept the video call but switched to the internal phone speaker instead of the external one. I heard about Siskin some months ago. Honestly, I haven't tried it yet. It might be that is fully functional, but the UI is so bare that there is no way that I'll be able to convince my father to switch to it. He still complains that he'd rather use WhatsApp like everyone else, so whatever XMPP brings now will be a case of "too little, too late".

tetraca 3y ago

Having set up and administrated both an XMPP and a Matrix server, XMPP is way less a pain in the ass. I've enjoyed dealing with prosody much more than either synapse or dendrite. XMPP doesn't tank my server every time I try to join a new room and it doesn't take forever to start talking in a room after you join it. And provided you're running the server, getting people onto XMPP has not been hard in my experience. I made a basic registration page with simple instructions. I have gotten people with low technical know-how to successfully register accounts and use it without issue. They just create an account, enter their username into a client I recommend, and they're ready to go (I've never even had them complain about OMEMO).

rglullis 3y ago
If you go through your contact list right now, how many people are on iOS, and how many of them do you think you could successfully convince to use XMPP as the primary method to reach you? With Matrix, I don't need to convince them.
- zaik 3y ago
  Monal on iOS has made it quite easy to convince people to contact me via XMPP. Right now I have 31 XMPP contacts and 1 Matrix contact.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Your about page: Interests: XMPP, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata. Nice, I'd like to be friends with you. But do you realize that maybe, just maybe, you are facing a bit of availability bias?
    - zaik 3y ago
      Oh sure, but it's still a counterexample to your statement. I can convince people to use XMPP, and almost nobody is using Matrix if you don't do the convincing.

rakoo 3y ago

I did it no later than Yesterday: - Install Conversations on Android - In a prompt, there's a "create an account", I create one (it's with conversations.im) - I have an account - At this point there's a slight confusion between "what discussions are happening" and "what discussions do you know about", but I manage to find a room to a discussion I'm interested in - Get in, see the messages The experience is definitely 100x nicer

rglullis 3y ago
OP was on iOS.
- binarymax 3y ago
  They were on both iOS and their Mac