Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

https://dino.im/blog/2020/01/dino-0.1-release/

by larma • 6 years ago

270 151 6 years ago

dino.im

Zash2• 6 years ago

Congratulations on the long-awaited first release!

ppjet67• 6 years ago

Congrats!

Leace• 6 years ago

I'm using Dino daily and it works well and looks modern. It still has minor issues here and there but it's finally a desktop client I can recommend to my non-technical friends.

One question though: is Windows version planned?

larma7• 6 years ago

Planned as in wanted: yes. Planned as in having it as a roadmap item: no, there is no roadmap :)

It's definitely something that is now becoming more relevant after the first release.

kawfey• 6 years ago

I'm not a linux hater, but as long as it's in linux-land, there won't be much mass adoption. Not necessarily a bad thing, but might as well named it YAXC and tossed it into the list[0] (oh turns out Dino is on the list and there's already something called YAXIM)

[0]https://xmpp.org/software/clients.html

Andrew_nenakhov6• 6 years ago

Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed.

XMPP, like email, is not a 'decentralized' protocol, but a federated one. If you and your chat partners use the same server, it would be as centralized as WhatsApp or Signal.

larma7• 6 years ago

I think you are confusing terms here, what you mean is distributed, which is only a subset of decentralized. Federated is also decentralized. See for example https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...

Beside that, Dino does support peer-to-peer file transfers using Jingle.

ryukafalz3• 6 years ago

Federated protocols are decentralized, though; there's no central point of control. This graphic has been done to death at this point but it's relevant here: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/c...

Andrew_nenakhov6• 6 years ago

Baran drew this pic almost 80 years ago. Since then, 'Decentralized' has become an umbrella term for both decentralized and distributed networks, and 'Federated' is currently a commonly accepted name for Email/XMPP type of networks. [1]

This makes sense, because Baran was describing a communication network, like later ethernet, where nodes were interchangeable, wherever in XMPP the nodes are not interchangeable: if you have an account on xmpp.org server, you can't connect to xmpp.jp server and receive your messages. Thus, such networks required a special more narrow name to define it.

[1] https://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/resources/articles/what...

joecool1029• 6 years ago

Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed.

It is decentralized in theory (no one server controls the network), but 'federated' is the correct word to use here.

When I saw the title I was assuming this was some cool new sort of client that created and managed a bunch of logins/identities as one on various XMPP servers and used something like OMEMO for key management on top of that 'layer'.

Tox is a better example of a 'decentralized' protocol.

dang• 6 years ago

We'll take 'decentralized' out of the title above, so hopefully people can discuss the project itself and not debate definitions.

travbrack• 6 years ago

Glad there's a modern alternative to big tech's walled chat gardens. It's tragic that this protocol has so much potential but the "last mile" of getting it out to users has prevented success since FB and Google ditched it.

sneak• 6 years ago

They ditched it because of inbound spam and because almost no one used it.

maximp• 6 years ago

Not to be confused with Deno, the secure JS runtime from the creator of Node: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102656

theamk• 6 years ago

Does this support offline messages and a history shared between devices? Lack of these features in XMPP was why my company moved to slack.

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

These are both supported by XMPP and are wide spread among servers. They are also supported by Dino.

komcinity2• 6 years ago

Are mobile versions in the pipeline?

komcinity2• 6 years ago

Are mobile version in the pipeline?

rahimnathwani• 6 years ago

For mobile, there's already 'Conversations': https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

larma7• 6 years ago

We are aiming for support for the Librem 5 and other smartphones that use a more GNU/Linux-ish environment. For Android there is conversations.im with a similar feature set.

jandrese4• 6 years ago

Does this finally get away from the problem that XMPP had in the old days, where the usage model was tightly bound to the domain model, so each domain would have one and only one XMPP server (plus possibly a fallback) and if you aren't the domain administrator then you can pound sand?

It was pretty much impossible to run your own server for fun unless you registered a domain or two because of the serious business logic baked into the design of the protocol.

Ages ago when I was working on a replacement for IRC for an organization that needed to decentralize its servers because they had a lot of users spread across the world behind iffy internet uplinks but all on the same domain this was a huge headache. The old IRC system worked really well for them, but some of the higher ups were upset because it wasn't "enterprise quality" and thus shouldn't be on their network.

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

That sounds like a server design problem, not a client problem. XMPP is stateful, so it is harder to have a distributed server but it's also doing something more complicated than eg. serving a document like HTTP. If you use a server like ejabberd and a proxy layer you can easily do geographic distribution of the server, or at least, with no more difficulty than any other protocol.

jandrese4• 6 years ago

It bled over into clients too. You would tell your client to connect to "google.com" and it was hardcoded to connect to "xmpp.google.com", with no option to choose a different server.

If you had multiple domains that you wanted to connect the servers would also default to xmpp.other.domain.

If you wanted to connect to test.my.domain to test2.my.domain you were SOL. In a lab environment you could hack it with local DNS fuckery, but to actually deploy it would have been a nightmare. The whole thing assumed the entire domain would be served by one single server and all clients would always have good connectivity.

Their old IRC model was just to have a local server at each site with a cache. When the network went down (which it did frequently), the local users would still have connectivity, and when the link came back up they would get the backscroll. Replicating this sort of config with XMPP turned out to be very difficult, and eventually the bosses relented and let them keep IRC, or at least they passed the problem off to someone else after I left.

sequoia• 6 years ago

Is this a client or is Dino also running a chat server/issuing accounts etc? I used to use pidgin/adium/finch back when google & facebook supported XMPP, but I'm not sure what I'd do with a client now.

Crucially: If I have Dino, can I chat with any of my friends? Or do I need to persuade them to install Dino & create an account somewhere first?

boudin• 6 years ago

Dino is a xmpp client, so no server. You have to create an account on a xmpp server to use it, which you can do on a public server or you can install your own server otherwise. Your friends needs a xmpp account somewhere (not required to be on the same domain) and can use any xmpp client to chat with you.

vertex-four3• 6 years ago

There’s a good many public XMPP servers, or you could run one for yourself and your friends (I recommend Prosody, it works pretty much out of the box for that use case). If they have any XMPP client on any server, you can talk to them.

linuxdude314• 6 years ago

What is the purpose of this? It seems more like a pet project than a serious release considering there's no roadmap.

What is your motivation? Surely you're aware of the abundant amount of XMPP client applications that have existed for the better part of the last 20 years?

larma7• 6 years ago

There is a section on motivation in the blog post (it literally has "Motivation" in the title):

A number of clients already exist for the XMPP protocol, however Dino sets a different focus. Existing clients target tech-savvy power users. The XMPP ecosystem lacks a client that is enjoyable to use while providing the features people expect from a modern chat application. Dino fills that gap by aiming to be secure and privacy-friendly while at the same time providing a great user experience.

asnyder3• 6 years ago

http://pidgin.im seems to be pretty easy. Doesn't require any tech-savvyness other than entering your credentials in a nice, intuitive interface, unless I'm missing something?

exabrial2• 6 years ago

Man, I need an XMPP client that does what slack does: group chats with the chat topics organized on the left side along with message history and status notifications.

xorcist2• 6 years ago

Perhaps not the answer you are looking for, but if you can bridge XMPP groups to IRC (for example with Biboumi) then The Lounge (thelounge.chat) is a great Slack-like IRC client.

rakoo4• 6 years ago

I heard kaiwa (http://getkaiwa.com/) is good, and it has this now standard Slack-like UI. Never used it though so I can't personally vouch for it.

exabrial2• 6 years ago

I've seen that but development seem to have died for a 5 years ago unfortunately :/ it looked very promising

asnyder3• 6 years ago

Looks like a nice project, but why wouldn't one use http://pidgin.im, which also supports XMPP and as far as I know is pretty solid, works well, and is also cross-platform?

What advantages does this have over Pidgin?

als0• 6 years ago

The enormous selection of Pidgin plugins (e.g. Discord, Office365, IRC, etc) also makes it really hard for me to give it up for a prettier program like Dino. I hope Dino supports at least OTR encryption.

upofadown3• 6 years ago

That sounds unlikely. Now that OMEMO is the hotness the interest in OTR has dropped pretty much to zero in the XMPP world. The Conversations client used to support OTR but that support has been discontinued.

drewcoo• 6 years ago

I had the same question. This seemed to be their answer:

A number of clients already exist for the XMPP protocol, however Dino sets a different focus. Existing clients target tech-savvy power users. The XMPP ecosystem lacks a client that is enjoyable to use while providing the features people expect from a modern chat application.

asnyder3• 6 years ago

I'm sure one needs to be more tech-savvy to use Dino than to use Pidgin :), but I understand they were likely not thinking about Pidgin, but it does exist.

ppjet67• 6 years ago

As I understand it, Pidgin's XMPP feature hasn't been maintained for some time now. It doesn't do many core features well or at all. If you like it and it suits you, great :)

frenchyatwork• 6 years ago

I'm not super familiar with the details, but I think Pidgin has little/no support for encryption (OMEMO & OpenPGP). This probably has support for other XMPP features that Pidgin doesn't as well.

What I don't know is how this is different than gajim.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

The Pidgin OTR plugin worked really well over many years, but I haven't used it in a while: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

craftyguy2• 6 years ago

Pidgin doesn't support OMEMO[0], which is sad. I've also had mixed results using MUC on pidgin/xmpp in the past..

0. https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/16801

im3w1l• 6 years ago

https://github.com/gkdr/lurch

larma7• 6 years ago

Last time I checked, Pidgin lacked proper support for multi device by not supporting Message Carbons (XEP-0280, required to receive messages on multiple devices when both are online at the same time) and Message Archive Management (XEP-0313, required to catch up with messages received while only another device was online).

There is probably also other examples of XMPP features that Pidgin does not and likely will never support, due to its nature of being multi-protocol (basically limiting features to the smallest common feature set).

xorcist2• 6 years ago

Pidgin can be very hit-and-miss with which parts of the protocol it implements. It is also a multi protocol client so a lot of the functionality is presented in a protocol agnostic way, which may not be what you're looking for if you're using it for XMPP alone.

For a desktop XMPP client, check out Gajim. It's stable and implements all that a user would expect (server side history, omemo).

markandrewj• 6 years ago

If you are interested in Pidgin, the lead developer has a Twitch stream (rw_grim). He is always open to ideas, and onboarding new contributors. There is a new version of Pidgin being written that significantly improves the user, and developer, experience. If you check out the stream, you could get some swag too (I have some Pidgin stickers). That said, I am also interested in Dino, and supporting other projects. It's unfortunate that chat has become more proprietary, instead of more open.

tomstockmail• 6 years ago

The dev is also active over on reddit.com/r/pidgin and the website has a link to the discord as well, ironically enough.

BlueTemplar5• 6 years ago

Last time I checked, Pidgin couldn't do cross *nix/Windows videoconferencing. So I picked Jitsi instead.

flatiron• 6 years ago

Does it do OTR?

larma7• 6 years ago

No. OTR was not considered due to its lack of multi device support. OTRv4 now supports multi device, so it could be an additional option once it becomes standardized for XMPP. We are also monitoring development around MLS.

craftyguy2• 6 years ago

The article says it supports OMEMO which, IMHO, is superior to OTR in many ways.

daryltucker• 6 years ago

Dino is slim and has some decent features, but Gajim is the client you want to be using today. Gajim has (although mostly broken) Voice and Video support as well as (working) plugin support and various plugins that you may expect.

Dino really fell short for me in my needs for XMPP client, though I'm happy to see federated systems and their clients being promoted.

Specifically Dino has issues with OMEMO support with Conversations, while Gajim does not see these issues. This means I can use Gajim on my computer and Conversations on my phone without issues.

ppjet67• 6 years ago

Maybe the OMEMO issues you're talking about are worth reporting?

larma7• 6 years ago

We fixed some issues with OMEMO in the last months, so if your experience is a little bit older, those might be fixed already. If not, please report.

Dino has a very limited plugin system, extending it is planned for future releases. We are also interested in adding support for A/V calling and we already have some pieces of code for it, though nothing in a quality for actual usage.

summersprite7• 6 years ago

you want to be using

Not everyone has to use the same thing.

As you said: Gajim does lots and lots of things, some of it only half-works. Gajim might be good for some people, but confusing for others. I probably wouldn't recommend it to my mom.

Dino has a good feature set and the user interface feels nice. It doesn't do everything, but that can also be a positive thing. Dino's OMEMO works fine for me.

fisle• 6 years ago

What issues did you have? I used Dino and Conversations for six months or so a year ago, and enjoyed the experience. Our conversations were all OMEMO encrypted.

julian-klode2• 6 years ago

Gajim's an unstable mess that half of the time is not even connected to the server because it did not manage to reconnect after resume, or it just crashes.

It is fairly useless on dark theme, rendering grey on grey for the backlog.

Apart from a missing status notifier / appindicator, gajim is miles ahead.

nightbrawler• 6 years ago

Used to communicate with a bunch of friends via AIM, then Google Talk (XMPP), then Yahoo IM... we gave up after the last one shutdown.

What's the goto XMPP service these days?

ppjet67• 6 years ago

I've been prosody for about 10 years now and I've always been happy with it. You can get it at https://prosody.im, and if necessary there's a good tutorial at https://homebrewserver.club/configuring-a-modern-xmpp-server...

EDIT: I might have misunderstood "service" thinking you wanted to self-host.

upofadown3• 6 years ago

Dunno. I think you just pick a server you like and use that:

* https://list.jabber.at/

Boulth• 6 years ago

If you don't want to self host I'd recommend https://account.conversations.im/ it's paid but properly maintained to have all extensions for modern experience. If you don't want to pay just pick something with good grades from https://compliance.conversations.im/old/

drcross• 6 years ago

Slightly off topic but I've never had success with self hosted prosody and the "conversations" app being able to share photos/memes as one would in WhatsApp or telegram. This is the one thing keeping me from being able to sell my non-tech friends on it, has anyone had any luck in this regard?

seba_dos13• 6 years ago

I'm using it with self-hosted ejabberd and have no issues. It just works.

duckMuppet• 6 years ago

That's a standard module included in ejabberd. It may not be enabled by default in others, such as prosody

upofadown3• 6 years ago

Enable the "http_upload" module if you have not yet done so.

rakoo4• 6 years ago

While I've been a believer of XMPP and still believes it has a place, I have to admit that it doesn't have the appeal it once has. Now the IM protocol du jour is Matrix, which might or might not know the same fate; who knows. And another one might come later, and there are already others today that exist and are widely used.

I think it's high time we had a concerted effort to have one great UI (probably per platform), and allow all protocol enthusiasts implement the specifics of their own choosing. It's fair to say that at this point the requirements for a "modern" UI are known, and while not all protocols may be up to the task, a very high percentage can be implemented in the most famous ones.

dragontamer• 6 years ago

I feel like the focus of XMPP puts the effort in the wrong place. FreeNode IRC is still used because community effort to maintain the channels. Similarly, subreddits live or die by community moderation.

An effort that simplifies channel maintenance, like how easy it is to open a new Subreddit (the #1 portal, a static website URL representing your community identity) is the most important step forward.

Once you establish a www identity for your community, then and only then can you discuss community chat.

For example, lobster.rs community meets on IRC FreeNode, a protocol established on their about page.

------

The reason Reddit, Facebook, and Discord are popular, is because of the easy web-based onboarding process for new users. There are also web guis which make it easy to start new communities.

Support the WWW first, and users will come (as long as the onboarding process is as easy as competitors)

dwaite2• 6 years ago

I agree, somewhat.

XMPP was primarily about person-to-person communication, with group channels being a separate add-on.

Part of iMessage's popularity is the ability to have group conversations the same way as those person to person communications - to the point where SMS users may get excluded from conversations.

IRC is just a terrible architecture which is exposed in its protocol, but it will survive a long time because you fire it up to participate in a community, not just to talk to an individual person.

IMHO paid tools like Slack got adoption when we had pre-existing protocols and clients for decades prior because it works as a package community-as-a-service (imho, to the point of being a detriment to usability). We had the technology to solve the problem, but the packaging and focus made it a legitimate product.

BlueTemplar5• 6 years ago

While it's worrying that Matrix uses the layer 7 HTTP (does it make it "layer 8"?) compared to XMPP's potentially more efficient use of layer 4 TCP, it's still better than the closed alternatives... (And JSON > XML !)

dependenttypes3• 6 years ago

It is actually a good idea to use https rather than your own protocol because then your network provider/government will not be able to (easily) find out that you aren't just making https requests using your browser. Useful for people living in oppressive governments as well as employees/students under restrictive firewalls. In addition to that this will get more efficient once we have http over quic.

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

I'm no fan of XML and think its use is one of XMPPs biggest flaws, but I wouldn't pick JSON over it… with XML at least you get a lot of the stateful encoding and namespacing (eg. extensions) right in your XML library of choice, with JSON you have to reinvent all of that which is more code, more spec, etc. I'm not really sure if there is a good alternative to XML, sadly :(

random3• 6 years ago

I was going to mention SSBC (ssbc.github.io). Is there a good write-up comparing the two?

emmelaich• 6 years ago

I guess you mean patchwork in particular?

A decentralized messaging and sharing app built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

ppjet67• 6 years ago

I want to say "it's complicated".

Probably any single protocol could be used to build a client that Slack or WhatsApp or [insert your target here] users would appreciate with good designers, (and/or with really little to no education.)

Multi-protocol clients are generally not optimal. The set of features that can be used will be the lowest common denominator, and if it's not the case there will be discrepancies in the design.

(Same story for bridges.)

Every protocol has their set of trade-offs, and every developer has their opinion on what's best (or the least worst). Also not every developer work with designers or have designing skills(!)

It's good for developers to be able to write what they want and how they want it. It's fine if their intended target is already with their circle of friends on the platform (if their is a target at all). It's less practical if the target is outside and their circle is not on the platform (network effect/peer pressure etc.).

That's a general "issue" in Free Software, (I'd say in software, maybe anywhere? it's just more visible here.)

Some might say waste of resources, but who gets to decide what to do with others' free time.. no easy answers.

(Sorry to spoil the fun by trying to rationalize :p)

I for one value freedom, through decentralisation (or federation as some like to insist on), and as technicalities I believe standard and extensibility of said standard are necessary. XMPP seems to fit this role ok enough to me.

rakoo4• 6 years ago

Of course I'm not saying that people should stop working on what they want, they are free to spend their time however they want. I'm looking at it the other way: what if I want to create a protocol but can't be bothered to work on the UI, because I'm no designer ?

I'm not even talking about multi protocol clients because, as you said, it tends to level downwards rather than upwards. But if I could "fork" the UI and slap my protocol on it, instead of having to build it from scratch, I'd save a lot of time.

rodolphoarruda• 6 years ago

What is "JID" and how can I get one?

kseistrup• 6 years ago

“JID” is short for “Jabber ID” (jabber being the original name for the protocol), and is for XMPP what an email address is for SMTP.

JIDs look like email addresses.

Unless you want to run your own XMPP server, you can register a JID at one of the public XMPP servers: https://list.jabber.at/

Whatitat90• 6 years ago

I'd advise checking the server at: https://compliance.conversations.im/old/

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

No mention of Psi? It was the most feature-rich XMPP client I had used. Though the UI felt quirky and less polished than Pidgin.

aidenn03• 6 years ago

Psi seems to be abandoned at this point. No carbons support, for example.

Flowdalic• 6 years ago

It still shows sign of ongoing development though: https://github.com/psi-im/psi/graphs/contributors?from=2016-...

dependenttypes3• 6 years ago

I tried Dino for a bit but returned to gajim straight away. Apparently Dino auto-accepts all omemo keys by default and while there is a way to globally disable it all of your current contacts will keep it on by default and I really did not feel like going through every single contact that I have and disabling it (as well as the keys that it accepted in the way).

mekster5• 6 years ago

It's sad that we don't have a very good self hosted chat solution.

Last time I checked around, XMPP didn't have a client that I could recommend to business clients that looked easy/simple to use, has no gotchas and looks native.

Currently I use Mattermost, which does basic things fine and things are stable but the formatting is just getting in the way making texts unnecessary big and bold when people never intend to (there is a per user setting to disable formatting but I can't tell everyone to turn it off), and reply and quoting interface is just wrong and I never use it, so most of the other people use another vendor service which is easy and does things in a saner way.

And video/voice is apparently not in their integrated goal and is thrown to some external paid service, so pretty much only simple text and file uploads.

I'm not looking for anything too special in my opinion but I find it there's no self hosted solution that has,

- Simple interface so I don't have to lecture people 10 minutes on how to use it.

- WYSIWYG formatting instead of automatically parsing symbols into bold texts etc

- File uploads

- Decent reply/quote feature

- Multiple people voice call

- Optionally multiple people video calls

- Native clients for desktop and clients and web Interface

ajconway• 6 years ago

Matrix seems to be the future now.

The present is, however, Slack.

bachmeier3• 6 years ago

The present is, however, Slack.

Actually, in terms of number of users, the present is MS Teams. Both companies release their numbers and it's not even close.

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

Matrix will likely never take off, sadly. I was hoping for an alternative for a while too, but not having a proper standards body to advocate for and push the standard probably means it's not displacing XMPP any time soon. Also the protocol just isn't great for chat; if you need a giant distributed graph database, great, but for chat it's just very heavy.

edhelas• 6 years ago

https://movim.eu/ maybe ? :) (doesn't have all the features listed)

rglullis• 6 years ago

Check Matrix/Synapse (server) and Riot (client)

lucideer• 6 years ago

WYSIWYG formatting instead of automatically parsing symbols into bold texts etc

Assuming you know the minimum features non-technical users want/need in such a tool is going to exclude a lot of options that might otherwise be viable.

WYSIWYG is probably the canonical example of this: non-technical users DON'T need WYSIWYG.

Slack has been the (non-self-hosted) solution du jour for what you describe. My company use Slack and we have thousands of non-technical staff on it: complaints were rife when they recently introduced WYSIWYG and we continue to get requests for help in disabling it.

For the future, I think Riot is your best bet. Matrix may suffer the same fate of XMPP, but if it escapes that fate, it'll be because of Riot.

It doesn't tick all your boxes yet, but RiotX is a hopeful project in terms of native, and the integrations it supports make a lot of features easy to add in some usable capacity.

mekster5• 6 years ago

complaints were rife when they recently introduced WYSIWYG and we continue to get requests for help in disabling it.

Can you tell me how they don't like it?

Do they rather want auto formatting like markdown or no formatting at all?

Andrew_nenakhov6• 6 years ago

(self-promoting here) We're building Xabber in exactly this direction. Currently, of your list wee lack multiple people voice/video calls, and also a native client for desktop.

Web version is rather mature already, with android / iOS clients coming to shape fast and will soon be released. We'll likely make an Electron-based desktop version, though of course it far from ideal

However, doing all this great stuff we had to replace many common XMPP extensions, like multi-user chat, which is utter garbage. The replacement works like ... well, Telegram groups, has nice fallback capabilities to legacy clients and is generally very well working.

mekster5• 6 years ago

Nice to know someone is working to create a sane solution.

Building for the web first and porting to Electron for desktop and webview for mobile is good as you can have identical interfaces for users to switch between and less bugs to chase for developers and I see no downside with that path.

I understand multi user calls/videos isn't simple as I still use Skype just for that for a group of people and it seems to do that part fine.

ryukafalz3• 6 years ago

Is this MUC replacement MIX or a custom thing?

In any case, I may have to give this a try - I used Xabber a bit on Android years ago.

otabdeveloper42• 6 years ago

- WYSIWYG formatting instead of automatically parsing symbols into bold texts etc

WhatsApp is the most popular chat app among non-technical users in the world, and it explicitly uses symbols instead of WYSIWIG for formatting.

I'm pretty sure you're making up these requirements without actually researching your target audience.

mekster5• 6 years ago

What does your research say?

I'm barely mentioning the features which people would generally expect out of chat apps.

Regarding the WYSIWYG, I always hear complaints, including myself that texts get weirdly formatted when they paste from somewhere else and it does more harm than good when symbols are automatically parsed, so the other option would apparently be WYSIWYG editor, which anyone will have no problem comprehending how to use.

You can't just expect everyone to read and learn formatting rules to type. I'm an engineer but I don't even want to remember some Mattermost formatting rules to avoid unintended transformations.

kitd2• 6 years ago

Someone recently pointed me at DeltaChat [1]. 'Chat' over SMTP/IMAP. Apart from voice/video, it ticks all of the above (plus other features such as threading and e2e security), with the fallback of being able to use a regular email client in an emergency

[1] https://delta.chat/en/

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

Does this have a standards body behind it advocating for and developing a spec that anyone can implement? I'd argue that this is a requirement for any communication system to take off and be useful and sustainable long term.

mekster5• 6 years ago

I wonder if it can handle large attachments efficiently, assuming postfix is set to allow 1GB attachment or so.

fiatjaf• 6 years ago

You basically listed all features ever invented. There's not a single "hosted" chat app that has all the features you want.

paule89• 6 years ago

Glad they do it right from the beginning. "Encryption, encryption, encryption Insert Balmer developer meme here"

My question is what does matrix do better than xmpp. What does xmpp do better than matrix?

SamWhited14• 6 years ago

Matrix works well as a big distributed graph protocol, not so much for chat. XMPP works well for chat or anything where you need efficient near-realtime streams (eg. stock trading and tickers sometimes use XMPP, some accessibility caption systems, etc.). Also XMPP is better standardized (by virtue of having a long-term non-profit standards body, Matrix is sort of trying to do that, but also trying to figure out how to monetize it which is never a good recipe for long term success when your spec becomes part of your product).

neiljohnson4• 6 years ago

There are multiple companies building on top of Matrix, some quite publicly like New Vector (https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...), some choose to do so more privately.

However, the protocol itself is governed by the Matrix.org Foundation acting as a neutral guardian (https://matrix.org/foundation/), so it unclear how the spec itself would become part of the product.

To suggest that Matrix itself is not well suited to chat is to ignore the rapid adoption of the protocol now used by millions of people.

Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging

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