1: xmpp has come a long way. rooms and video/audio calling work seamlessly even with my parents who are non-technical. (can’t really speak for the state of apps on ios/mac since we don’t have any of those, but some new updates for siskin and monal are said to have some major improvements)
2: e2e encryption via omemo is also enabled by default and works great for 1:1 chats and private groups.
additionally there are now some services that are great for easy onboarding like snikket for running your own server and quicksy for getting users onboarded with a familiar phone number flow (they get an address in the form +@quicksy.im).
Interesting take. I feel the complete opposite, though (With some intense caveats so bear with me here).
While XMPP is definitely more mature, it was more interesting 20 years ago when text chat was king, and voice and video chat was just a novelty. The problem with comparing Matrix and XMPP is that, while on the surface, they seem like competitors, being federated messaging standards, XMPP is first and foremost an instant messaging protocol. Rooms feel added on after, and where voice chat exists, it’s a complete afterthought. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. The extreme intercompatibility of XMPP is a great feature, but you can never, ever know if your correspondents can utilize voice chat unless you ask them[1].
In Matrix, however, rooms and VoIP are first-class citizens. I don’t know if I can say “from the very beginning”, but it sure seems like Matrix, and especially Element were made, from the beginning, with VoIP in mind. While the monopoly of the Element/Synapse ecosystem is problematic, it’s helpful to just be able to assume a person you’re talking to will be able to utilize all the same features you are. Even under the best circumstance, I don’t think you even get close to that in XMPP.
For years, I was rooting for XMPP, it’s got everything I want in a text chat, but if I want to convince my friends to use something other than Discord or Whatsapp, it needs the features that people want[2] from those apps. XMPP is great, but Matrix is solving a different problem. A problem that XMPP can solve, but only if you’re willing to put in the work.
[1] Maybe some XMPP clients have a way of notifying the user of VoIP capability, I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t seen it.
[2] Not to mention end-to-end encryption, which I know is possible in XMPP, but as an afterthought. It’s not a selling point if I have to walk a non-technical user through turning it on, and they have to remember to do it for each chat.
Edit: Final thoughts: If you can show me an out-of-the-box XMPP solution like Synapse/Element that I can launch in a day, and get my Discord friends on, I’ll gladly set it up and try it out!
I find this article clickbait and useless. It basically says “Criminals are using Jabber. But also Skype. But mostly Jabber.” without any context, any methodology, any number.
Typical Internet stuff which does more harm than good.
We’ve been kicking the tires on this recently, and it’s really nice. For the kind of stuff we’re doing, google docs isn’t quite right and we’d prefer to self-host. Nextcloud isn’t quite what we’re looking for either, and this was easier to get running.
It feels like a collaborative editor (in a good way) similar to one of those but with github-ish flavored markdown.
The man page is excellent. The UX is terrible. Still, it’s a mind-blowing concept.
I think that really sums up Plan 9 nicely. Every time I try out Plan 9 or read something like this, I’m beyond amazed at the ideas present here, and I wonder why we’re doing everything the hard way. But I can never bring myself to use it for more than a few hours because the UI is just so dang opinionated.
Sure thing. This license is not about close-sourcing though, it’s about depriving for-profit entities (and the military industrial complex) from using open source software. In that sense, it’s not “free software” (according to GNU).
I don’t think it’s a good license i would use (it still allows many bad actors to use the software), but i found it interesting so i shared the link ;)
I really like Cory Doctorow and I highly appreciate his daily “pluralistic”. It’s a blog worth reading and it could be easily translated to Gemini as he always put links in plain text.
https://github.com/rgab1508/PixelCraft
Though there is only this blog post in the series, there are many videos (see link at the bottom of the post for link to first video).
we use conversations. it’s really lovely and can replace any mainstream chat app.
I run two ejabberd servers, hmm.st for friends and family and one for tilde.team that’s hooked up to shell authentication.
Thank you! What app do you and your parents use?
1: xmpp has come a long way. rooms and video/audio calling work seamlessly even with my parents who are non-technical. (can’t really speak for the state of apps on ios/mac since we don’t have any of those, but some new updates for siskin and monal are said to have some major improvements)
2: e2e encryption via omemo is also enabled by default and works great for 1:1 chats and private groups.
additionally there are now some services that are great for easy onboarding like snikket for running your own server and quicksy for getting users onboarded with a familiar phone number flow (they get an address in the form +@quicksy.im).
Interesting take. I feel the complete opposite, though (With some intense caveats so bear with me here).
While XMPP is definitely more mature, it was more interesting 20 years ago when text chat was king, and voice and video chat was just a novelty. The problem with comparing Matrix and XMPP is that, while on the surface, they seem like competitors, being federated messaging standards, XMPP is first and foremost an instant messaging protocol. Rooms feel added on after, and where voice chat exists, it’s a complete afterthought. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. The extreme intercompatibility of XMPP is a great feature, but you can never, ever know if your correspondents can utilize voice chat unless you ask them[1].
In Matrix, however, rooms and VoIP are first-class citizens. I don’t know if I can say “from the very beginning”, but it sure seems like Matrix, and especially Element were made, from the beginning, with VoIP in mind. While the monopoly of the Element/Synapse ecosystem is problematic, it’s helpful to just be able to assume a person you’re talking to will be able to utilize all the same features you are. Even under the best circumstance, I don’t think you even get close to that in XMPP.
For years, I was rooting for XMPP, it’s got everything I want in a text chat, but if I want to convince my friends to use something other than Discord or Whatsapp, it needs the features that people want[2] from those apps. XMPP is great, but Matrix is solving a different problem. A problem that XMPP can solve, but only if you’re willing to put in the work.
[1] Maybe some XMPP clients have a way of notifying the user of VoIP capability, I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t seen it.
[2] Not to mention end-to-end encryption, which I know is possible in XMPP, but as an afterthought. It’s not a selling point if I have to walk a non-technical user through turning it on, and they have to remember to do it for each chat.
Edit: Final thoughts: If you can show me an out-of-the-box XMPP solution like Synapse/Element that I can launch in a day, and get my Discord friends on, I’ll gladly set it up and try it out!
I find this article clickbait and useless. It basically says “Criminals are using Jabber. But also Skype. But mostly Jabber.” without any context, any methodology, any number.
Typical Internet stuff which does more harm than good.
I found the example very interesting, especially if you can try it for free however it’s quite memory hungry.
Yeah, 1GB of RAM is not enough to federate with the rest of the matrix homeservers, so it’s only useful for private deployments
compare xmpp. matrix is still mostly unusable in its current state.
To jumpstart everyone into action for the new year :D
For a second I thought this was going to be that Amazon leaked some/all of their keys for AWS… hehe
We’ve been kicking the tires on this recently, and it’s really nice. For the kind of stuff we’re doing, google docs isn’t quite right and we’d prefer to self-host. Nextcloud isn’t quite what we’re looking for either, and this was easier to get running.
It feels like a collaborative editor (in a good way) similar to one of those but with github-ish flavored markdown.
I think that really sums up Plan 9 nicely. Every time I try out Plan 9 or read something like this, I’m beyond amazed at the ideas present here, and I wonder why we’re doing everything the hard way. But I can never bring myself to use it for more than a few hours because the UI is just so dang opinionated.
I love that he called it “the sagrada familia of operating systems”. That’s a very neat explanation of Plan 9 to my eye.
Really interesting report on plan9, the operating system that never was (finished), where every API is a filesystem.
Sidenote: the author got mad at the nazis from 9front and ends the article with a pertinent quote from Simon Wiesenthal:
update: still didn’t work :(
Sure thing. This license is not about close-sourcing though, it’s about depriving for-profit entities (and the military industrial complex) from using open source software. In that sense, it’s not “free software” (according to GNU).
I don’t think it’s a good license i would use (it still allows many bad actors to use the software), but i found it interesting so i shared the link ;)
I really like Cory Doctorow and I highly appreciate his daily “pluralistic”. It’s a blog worth reading and it could be easily translated to Gemini as he always put links in plain text.
The article was interesting, but I found much more interesting the talk linked from it: https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM