Zash
Zash on Hacker News
> we have zero fragmentation so far. some clients implement more features than others
The Matrix spec has many versions and many features. Clients implement and keep up with varying parts of it due to varying reasons usually involving varying amounts of manpower and funding. Same as with XMPP. I don't see the difference.
Pretty sure I remember the AP spec author saying the whole thing works very much like XMPP. But they couldn't have built on top of XMPP for some unspecified reason.
Pretty sure the client feature parity problem is inherent to open ecosystems with many vendors with varying priorities and budgets. Just look at the web back when there were more browsers in the game, or email clients etc.
XMPP simply does not have enough Hype, it's just boring old technology that keeps working and getting better over time despite lack of funding and startups.
But most of all, users care about talking to their friends. You could have all the features and amazing UX but if their friends are using tin cans and wet wire, that's what they will turn to. Network effect trumps all. Features and UX are marketing, which at most can help you bootstrap to the point where network effect kicks in.
Be the change you wish to see in the world ;)
Congrats on the release! Reactions, replies and mobile Linux support are all features many users have asked for.
DNSSEC-secured DNS with PowerDNS
Federated XMPP chat with Prosody
Email with Postfix and Dovecot
Prometheus keeping track of it all
and Grafana to draw some pretty graphs for how it's all going
Looks like it's based on the established and mature standard XMPP. Not disappointing to me.
I remember it the other way around, Google killed Talk and repeatedly replaced it with non-XMPP things while XMPP survived to this very day!
But, XMPP is push all by itself already, and works with mobile push notification services where needed.
The physical keyboard was certainly nice, especially for a linux sysadmin / programmer. I also miss the camera, the "normal" and familiar Linux environment, the unified messaging (native XMPP support, with A/V calling!). It was sturdy despite the moving (keyboard) parts. Phone experience was decent, certainly better than my current Android, but can't beat my first phone, the Nokia 3310.
It's XMPP that misses you ;)
> Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol
[citation needed]
How can XMPP have failed when I and many others use it daily? When many things like Snikket and Zoom and WhatsApp are built on it?
Maybe the key is network effect and enough marketing to bootstrap it?
See also: Article 42 (7) of the Treaty of the European Union
Posted by
Zash on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @12:27PM
from the europarl.europa.eu dept.
Also, as I understand it OTRv4 intentionally does not target multi-device scenarios so it seems unlikely to gain any wider adoption for the kind of use cases XMPP and Matrix target, where being able to see your chats on other devices is considered a feature and not a security issue.
In the past, people have squeezed Prosody onto their routers with 32MB RAM and the like. Today you might struggle fitting the Modern XMPP experience into that, but 512M or 1GB should be plenty.
As for storage, it really depends on how many and how big pictures or other files are shared. Clients like Conversations will compress images into a few hundred KB by default, so you can imagine how many will fit into even 1GB. Text messages take even less space.
WebSockets is just another transport method, by itself it is not going to be very different from plain old TCP/TLS sockets. Other things are going to matter more, like how 'chatty' the protocol is, especially while you are not actively sending messages. XMPP has historically been quite chatty while idle, but todays modern XMPP servers know to optimize traffic so that your phone can sleep undisturbed in your pocket until something important like a message or a call comes in.
Well, if it was _a_ client. But if 100% of clients make the same mistake, then it is the spec that is the problem, or so the argument went.
Maybe one day xhtml-im will make a glorious return as a 2.0, with bigger, better and scarier warnings about sanitizing your inputs
Do not mention the format war.
Once upon a time, we had XHTML-IM https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0071.html
But then web developers came along and just put this directly into the DOM of their web clients, leading to endless XXS exploits, so XEP-0071 was burned at the stake.
XEP-0393 might look ad-hoc, but it's essentially what people were typing into their chats and emails since time immemorial.
People sometimes think this is Markdown and then pick a markdown library off the shelf and then the HTML passtrough bites them, leading us back to the beginning.
I really don't understand how Matrix and Mastodon etc are allowed to pass around HTML embedded in JSON as if that somehow solves all those problems.