XMPP works – 1 July 2020

https://xmpp.org/2020/07/newsletter-01-july/

by upofadown • 6 years ago

99 77 6 years ago

foxfired• 6 years ago

What was it about XMPP that made people move to facebook, slack, hangout or other closed systems?

In 2011, at my job everyone used their own favorite account to chat with each other. I'd logged on Empathy with my yahoo mail. My coworkers were on gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, and some I can't even remember. Chatting wasn't a problem. How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?

black_puppydog• 6 years ago

facebook and google at least simply isolated their users from the rest of xmpp at some point. oops, if only we had been warned.

I will never forget how a few years back, a friend (and a techie at that, albeit more scientific) explained to me their amazing idea of a messenger that you could use between different chat providers, and messages would just go from one to the other. "Imagine you could send a message on facebook and I would read it on google!" I could see something die in their eyes when I explained that not only was there a solution to this, but also, facebook and google had both already decided to kill that solution.

Oh well... don't buy into walled gardens kids.

ReactiveJelly• 6 years ago

Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other.

At least we have some solace [1] in that, unlike chat and Git, it's fucking impossible to self-host e-mail.

[1] This part is the joke.

rektide5• 6 years ago

"How did it go from being a convenient thing for everyone to everyone should use slack?"

Correction. Everyone went to Facebook. Because Facebook was convenient. Now we are all heading to slack (& discord) because XMPP was no longer convenient & the right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it.

sacks2k• 6 years ago

"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it"

I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately.

I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past.

It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats.

Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.

Jtsummers• 6 years ago

XMPP was only the protocol. Google and others provided federation with it then took it away later. This decimated the social network size. When the vast majority connects to others primarily via Google Talk and its descendants or Facebook messenger, XMPP, as a protocol, didn’t stand a chance.

jcahill• 6 years ago

Bridges were shut down to push proprietary chat spinoffs of social media websites. Ex. Facebook had an XMPP bridge for a couple years but shut it down for this reason.

justinsaccount• 6 years ago

Probably around 2011 I was trying to push for XMPP at a .edu for internal chat (they was no current system at all).

Around that time the iPad was showing up everywhere and I found was that there were zero good iOS XMPP clients. Every single one we tried, I'd notice it was proxying the credentials through a 3rd party server to deal with the lack of background connection support and to handle the push notifications. This was a major security issue, and also meant it would have been unusable during an internet outage.

This sort of thing, combined with the lack of server side history was probably what killed it.

toast02• 6 years ago

Yeah, Android in 2011 could just run a connection in the background and actually work (assuming the client pings when idle / and adapts the ping interval to avoid stateful firewalls with low idle timeouts).

But iOS doesn't let you do background sockets, so you need push messages, and that's hard to coordinate between unrelated XMPP servers and clients. Of course, modern Android doesn't let you have background sockets either.

kalleboo• 6 years ago

Mobile push notifications and chat history sync

codezero• 6 years ago

My tinfoil hat theory (that others may have had, or it may be something I read somewhere...) is that the XMPP protocol was part of what made PRISM successful, and the timing of these orgs adding XMPP is kind of aligned with when they were “online” for PRISM.

I’m pretty sure the larger orgs that were targeted could tell that the only way this information leaked easily, or was justified, was because of XMPP metadata, or some other large scale flaw.

The XMPP group also had a pretty visible security/encryption lockdown that I didn’t feel like was explained well, or maybe I just didn’t understand it :) https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...

GuardLlama• 6 years ago

XMPP doesn't "work", but on the other hand, the alternatives probably worse:

1. Don't run your own server? A co-worker once operated a fairly popular "public" XMPP server with a decent number of typically active users, a couple hundred. Some eastern European "darkweb" drug sellers had an account on the server, so their competitors thought it worthwhile to threaten the XMPP operator with very directed violence. If you don't host your own, who is running your XMPP server? What will they do when the government/yourThreatActor threatens them?

2. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push notifications? Their Windows 10 desktop? Ubuntu Linux?

3. If you run your own server, what do you do in the unlikely event of spam?

4. Crypto? OTR sucks for multi-device, OMEMO isn't extensively supported.

XMPP obviously doesn't work, but I can't suggest anything that's better.

upofadown• 6 years ago

I count 20 OMEMO supporting clients:

* https://omemo.top/

aidenn0• 6 years ago

I use an android phone, so this may be out of date, but every time I check, the iOS XMPP clients are terrible in at least one important way, and often in several.

simlevesque• 6 years ago

OMEMO just works for me. I use OMEMO XMPP SMS with JMP.chat

techntoke2• 6 years ago

Just started using this and love it. I think I may be able to finally ditch Hangouts/GV.

jayd162• 6 years ago

When I used it professionally it was always a pain. XMPP was very chatty for mobile. Multi user chat and chat history was a pain to get working. Clustering was also dark magic. This was Ejabberd which was considered the best option at the time.

At the time, it felt like every feature was stuck in beta/RFC mode with very poor cross server compatibility. How is a federated protocol supposed to work like that?

I think XMPP just failed to cater to any audience. The Googles and Facebooks could roll their own and for everyone else it was too cumbersome. It's not as "easy" as running an email server and no one wants to do that either. It wasn't even agile enough to woo small communities with whiz-bang features.

icedchai2• 6 years ago

I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful.

On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

jcbrand• 6 years ago

Running an XMPP server is much easier than running a mail server.

I know, I've run both for a number of years.

Very few people need clustering support.

rektide5• 6 years ago

the MUC is not good. this is true. there is MIX, XEP-0369, that has a way better under-the-hood approach that re-uses a lot of the existing XEPs (whereas MUC was early & kind of it's own thing).

alas MIX adoption is very low. ejabberd got MIX support in 2016 but it's stayed at 0.1.0. and, more pressingly, i don't think any clients support it. this has to change for XMPP to pass MVP muster. https://www.reddit.com/r/xmpp/comments/arpruf/what_clients_s...

harlanji• 6 years ago

I built Siashable with ExtJS and xmpp4js in 2008 against Openfire. I’ve run it at various times against Tigase and Prosody and it works, and even ran the XMPP lib I made for it in iOS JS Core recently, and it has its own everything down to DOM with namespace support in JS so works back to early IE versions. I’d say XMPP with BOSH works pretty good.

risyachka• 6 years ago

League of Legends chat, WhatsApp and early versions of Facebook chat were build with XMPP and Ejabberd and they were able to handle massive loads with it.

Obviously for an internal company chat app this is not the best option as it will require some maintenance, and the app support is not great, though there are some good options now.

But for heavy chat load it is a great choice that will save you a ton of money, time and resources.

jojobas2• 6 years ago

1) Host your own server, don't make it public. 2) The fact that there were so many non-mandatory and sometimes competing XEPs was a major setback indeed. 3) There were measures for that, such as that unknown users should answer "how much is pi*0" kind of questions

Matrix seems to solve items 2 and 4, lets see how much traction it gets.

ta177117712• 6 years ago

Multiple government and large nonprofits have adopted it, what more traction can you ask for in free open source?

Semaphor• 6 years ago

1. there are a bunch of public servers that have been running for a long time. Including one by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club, German privacy and security advocacy NGO).

2. IMO the biggest hindrance with XMPP. So which XEPs do I need to support on the server? Okay, got what I wanted. How do I find out exactly which are supported on which client?

3. Manual account creation, thanks to federation I don’t need external users to be on my server.

4. OMEMO works with every halfway decent client. Of course, closed ecosystems like iOS might be different, but that’s what you get for locking yourself in.

samoa422• 6 years ago

on 1. the mentioned server was(is?) suffering from to much publicity. the ccc tried very hard to get ppl to use different ones.

MattJ1003• 6 years ago

This is the gap Snikket[1] is aiming to fill. A preconfigured XMPP server that you can safely and easily run yourself (it's invite-based registration), with "blessed" apps provided for each platform that are guaranteed to be maintained to a common standard.

It's early days and there's still some way to go, but the current release (server + Android client) is receiving excellent feedback from those using it.

The next primary focus is iOS. There are several XMPP clients available on iOS, but none yet fit the bill. That's where most of the work ahead lies for the coming months.

[1] https://snikket.org/

Andrew_nenakhov3• 6 years ago

So you took Conversations, renamed them, and call it a day, focusing next on iOS? Then I've got rather bad news for you. You'll need to be focusing for a long, long time.

It took us 'only' 2.5 years to build a good XMPP client for iOS (which we plan to release this month, finally), and while building it we had to break down XMPP down almost to a core and replace most of its components with better thought through solutions that account for real life scenarios.

We had to throw away MUC garbage, do push notifications differently, make different video calling, etc. - and that requires modifications on the server-side. Now it works acceptably, just some rather little quirks/bugs remain. It is no coincidence that not one released XMPP client today can be called 'working'.

However, to make it work _really_ great we'll have to do 'break' XMPP even further and rethink how presences work. Currently, they are a major pain.

rektide5• 6 years ago

Quick scan of the website & the github. Did not find direct mentions of XMPP. Does this interop with other XMPP systems or is this based-on-XMPP but standalone? I would not adopt or recommend this, framed as it is as it's own thing.

the8472• 6 years ago

2. If you do (or don't!) run your own server, how do the end users find a halfway decent application on their fancy iPhone 18 Pro++ that supports push notifications?

That's a problem with the iphone, not xmpp. Apple restricts what you can do with your hardware and offers no other options than their push notification approach. You cannot blame existing protocols for apple's distributed-software-hostile whims of the day. Blame apple for only offering an anemic subset of the internet.

randomchars• 6 years ago

As an iPhone user, I'm very happy that apps can't implement their own push notification systems, or have persistent background connections open, as it's one of the main reasons I get good battery life.

puzzlingcaptcha• 6 years ago

I run my own ejabberd instance for a group of friends and it obviously works.

I do manual account creation and know people there (or they are vetted by my friends). The server federates with any other server that supports s2s encryption so they can talk to whoever they want.

On windows probably the most mature client is Gajim. You can use it on Linux too, but there are more alternatives (such as the more modern Dino.im) On Android there is the excellent Conversations, with a few more to choose from. Or you can go with a platform-independent web-based client and use Movim. All support OMEMO. I am not invested in the Apple ecosystem so I don't know about that (Beagle IM? Monal?).

Typically the XMPP naysaying is a mix of bad experiences in the past and NIH syndrome. Things like server-side message archiving, message carbons, message delivery receipts or MUCs are long solved. You want to make a stand for open, federated internet you need to put your money where your mouth is.

About the only sore points are cross-platform VoIP (Windows lacking here) and direct file transfers (SOCKS5 bytestreams are wonky which leaves http uploads) although arguably neither have to be a part of a chat application.

rektide5• 6 years ago

Good reply, thanks. I am very pro #XMPP. Which is also why I yearn for a couple real areas of improvement & focus:

* MIX. there's a new standard for group-chats/rooms that is far less ad-hoc/special-case, that uses other XMPP extensions (XEPs) very well & enables features people expect in chat these days. it's a good standard. MIX (XEP-0369) support is still alpha level or non-existent. this is needed for a quality experience, with reactions, chat history, & as a technical advancement out of a bad shifty early legacy solution.

* Video. There are not a lot of video supporting clients. I think the spec is mostly ok for 1:1 video. But "Muji" multi-user video got demoed a decade ago & works but is more or less unimplemented. This is not cool. I think Muji also should probably be rebuilt anyways atop MIX.

* web integration. i'd like to be able to use my XMPP account online in a well-defined way. xmpp should start to define ways to make user accounts also OpenID Connect (OIDC) providers, & begin to define interoperation for webrtc & XMPP & the web to work together harmoniously.

kilo_bravo_3• 6 years ago

I've been using Riot to connect to Matrix.

Works very well and Riot is on: iOS, MacOS, Windows, Google Play, F-Droid, Linux, and has a very nice web application.

This is what got me started: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c...

opendomain• 6 years ago

One of the first OpenDomain!

Multicomp• 6 years ago

Can anyone point me to other RSS-able newsletters I should follow? Between This Week In Matrix, Sergey Tihon's F# Weekly, Pine64s updates on the Pinephone, and now this XMPP newsletter (which admittedly I thought was a Johnny-come-lately approach to showing that XMPP was cool like Matrix, see, we've got the newsletter stuff too! - but A: it's clear they have been doing this for a bit and B: I digress), I'm enjoying reading tech 'periodicals' and keeping up with what's new in my favorite technologies.

est• 6 years ago

It's never about the protocol, it's about the SLA of the server and UX design of the client.

techntoke2• 6 years ago

It seems like with the right client that IRC could basically do what Discord does today, but without the need for all the bloat.

xellisx• 6 years ago

I love mIRC.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

TheLounge is an interesting web client for IRC that's very useable on mobile.

zelphirkalt• 6 years ago

A while ago I tried getting the latest version of Gajim (XMPP client) to run with OMEMO (encryption plugin) on Trisquel. I worked through lots and lots of compilation issues for dependency libraries of Gnome and other stuff that was new to me, but after trying for something like 3 or 4 days, I lost motivation. I also did not want to use the version number-wise much older version of Gajim to be able to use it. Perhaps that was silly of me.

I did run the older version to try Gajim out and to see how one connects to servers and which servers to use and whatever. That worked actually pretty well. I only had to find an OMEMO supporting server in at least superficially trustworthy hands. I really likes the instant feeling of sending messages and being able to log into 2 accounts on different servers and sending myself messages.

I'll have to try it again at some point. I would really like to know a reliable long term server, run by people with a privacy mindset though.

Andrew_nenakhov3• 6 years ago

XMPP is a very resilient protocol that has survived the years of neglect and mismanagement by the XSF.

ppjet6• 6 years ago

As a board member of the XSF for this term and for the first time, I don't really find myself in disagreement. It seems to me the culture of change is almost nonexistent and it's hard or close to impossible to get the XSF to provoke it.

Markoff• 6 years ago

it doesn't really matter if nobody is using it, this is Betamax vs VHS all over

XMPP works – 1 July 2020

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