It's great, problem is adoption with non tech people. You clearly had better luck with your friends and family than most. It's hard enough to get them to use something as standard as Signal.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Agree it's easier to get techies on board. With normal people it is kind of a struggle competing and argumenting against the likes of WhatsApp, FB messenger and such. But I totally think it's worth it because privacy.
I host my own XMPP server and I like it (super lightweight and easy to set up), but good god the people that work on XMPP stuff seem to not want it to take off at all. They all complain that everybody is using matrix for some mysterious reason and when you explain that you can’t in good conscience get your friends to switch to it because there aren’t really great iOS apps it’s just a hissy fit about how people should use android instead… which is just not very realistic. Really wish XMPP had a good cross platform client. The client situation is improving rapidly and OMEMO finally mostly works everywhere! But it’d be really nice if there was a consistent client between platforms.
That all sounds really critical, but I really do like XMPP and I really hope it gets better and gains more traction again! We really need good federated chat again, ideally just associated with an email address or something… because the current chat ecosystem is a mess!
We used to use it at work and I loved it but then eventually got replaced by slack which I am not a fan of.
slack is the worst team communicate software ever existed. Everything is better than it.
Its not great, but its nowhere near half as bad as teams
absolutely it is, worst part I hate is I cant mute/block anyone. Just have to deal with that annoying douche yapping all day in chat.
We use Teams and friends at work, so I know the struggle.
My colleagues and I had set up a nice self-hosted XMPP server which everyone could use to chat in-house without any of the traffic leaving our network. We had it end-to-end encrypted and it was quick and easy. Then management (with the support of a few employees who like hype) switched us to Slack. It wasn't private, it wasn't end-to-end encrypted, all our confidential messages went out to the internet, the boss could technically read anything we wrote, and many people didn't like the UI. Once management got frustrated with Slack they switched us to Microsoft Teams. After using that for a year, I miss Slack. Teams is a bloated buggy mess with a UI designed to confuse and no privacy, and it also has all the disadvantages of Slack.
A few of us have secretly switched to Matrix and Element. It's good. Don't tell management.
the boss could technically read anything we wrote
I guarantee this was a large part of why they forced the switch.
Reminds me of a company I recently got an job interview to (and got declined, but I would've declined anyway).
They were switching around their software every year and are currently in the process of migrating to Teams
@floofloof I would love to move to Matrix/Element but don't know a single person who uses it, so it doesn't seem like it would much benefit me unfortunately. I do still have an account though.
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I’ve been self-hosting Matrix for years and it’s been amazing.
What I have to give to XMPP is that it's one of the easiest federated services to self-host. Running Prosody is super simple.
Prosody is amazing and I’m still astounded by how easy it is to get XMPP up and running. That’s great stuff!
We had an XMPP server at work but 90% of people wouldn't bother using it. As much as I dislike Teams it the only client that's ever been deployed in my company that everyone actually uses.
I'm still on irc
Irc is underrated. Its my example for people getting upset communities are moving to forums instead of the fediverse sometimes because its old that old does not mean outdated.
And don't get me wrong, I really like this communication model, but I would never suggest it for a major software project community. I need things to be fully baked for official adoption. Part of my interest in contributing here is getting us enough critical mass that threadiverse development gets to that fully baked point
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I had my own server and used it for a long time until Android decided that it knows better what background services I want to have running and thus killed the "instant" part of instant messaging.
Since then I'm on Signal and could at least convince most of my friends and family to move there.
I use it for OMEMO encrypted family messaging and image transfer (snikket). Very fast messaging, lightweight server, and the A/V works quite well. Biggest issue, imo, is the lack of a great iOS client - not a judgement on the developers, I think that's just the reality of developing on iOS. But an iOS client that works as seamlessly as Conversations would go a long way to regaining lost traction.
This is what I’ve been saying for years. Siskin is pretty good these days, but it’s still not perfect (push notifications with OMEMO have no content). It’s really hard to recommend XMPP to people when the iOS experience is kind of bad (with omemo, anyway).
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It's trivial to self host. I'm running a server on a small VPS for the family. Best part is they don't even know they are running XMPP, just installed Conversations and that was it.
I switched to iOS from android a while ago, but conversations was an AMAZING app and I wish there was something even half as good on iOS. That said… isn’t it the case that conversations is a paid app on Google play, and only free on fdroid? It’s totally worth the $2 or whatever it was on Google play, but I feel like it’s a hard sell for normal people who are used to free chat apps? Did you have any problems with that, or has the situation changed since I last looked?
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IIRC Google Talk using XMPP and most major messengers having GTalk integration, they pretty much accidentally federated several messenger apps
They took out XMPP years ago. I had a lot of hope for the future when they first federated. Even ran my own server and was able to talk to Google Talk users. Alas...
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Google's messaging play has only gotten worse since then. Oh well.
I still cannot believe the Google I/O where they killed Talk and said “we’re consolidating all of the Google chat applications into hangouts. There will only be hangouts” and then the very next Google I/O they announced TWO new chat applications (allo and duo), and whose purpose I never understood, and then every year since they’re like “everything is Google meet now… no, not that Google meet, the other Google meet” and I have absolutely no idea what’s going on and nothing makes me feel so old and out of touch like trying to follow Google’s chat ecosystem.
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When I lost my cell modem due to the 3g shutdown, I switched to xmpp for home automation for a while. I should probably set that up again...
It's well worth it.
It's the best obviously ;)
Check out: https://slrpnk.net/c/xmpp (which was moved from lemmy.ml as the community there is effected by a bug).
Also see: https://joinjabber.org/
How does this compare with matrix?
TL;DR: Matrix is good for text AND binary data (XMPP is text only) but XMPP is a bit more centralized than matrix, though both work based on federation principles. XMPP is more lightweight but supports more config options.
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I like XMPP and OTR is nice, but we need double-ratchet for secure communications and sync with multiple devices.
Omemo is double ratchet and my messages sync to multiple devices. New device can't read old messages sent before exchanging keys with the other clients.
I'd use it but theres no one to use it with
I use it for pretty much all of my stuff, both as a message bus as well as a command-and-control mechanism for my bots.
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@privsecfoss I would absolutely love to get back to #XMPP as my main (ideally only) IM, but in time some things made it hard to do so:
- it's extensible and not all clients support all modernly needed extensions - the #Jabber XEP solves this (on paper/standard level)
- loads of spam - again, tackled by Jabber XEP bundle and clients that fully implement it
- and ultimately, 90% of my contacts there never pop up anymore - network effect problem
@hook
Extensibility is not a reason not to use XMPP.
It's true, not all XMPP software supports every feature. However we didn't all stop browsing the web because Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support HTML5 🙂
There is plenty of modern XMPP software to choose from, and if you don't want to choose, Snikket is a great place to start (in my humble opinion - I work on that project).
@privsecfoss
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