How Prosody developers spent 2020

https://blog.prosody.im/2020-retrospective/

by upofadown • 6 years ago

70 41 6 years ago

blog.prosody.im

phoe-krk• 6 years ago

Prosody does not “phone home” in any way, which means we do not have a lot of insight into how many people are using Prosody. But there are some indicators that we can use to see at least the growth of the project.

Great kudos for the authors for writing their software this way; this is analytics done right.

half-kh-hacker• 6 years ago

I think XMPP is a really good contender in the non-centralized personal-and-public messaging space. It doesn't look like an insurmountable effort from one person to support the XEPs required to create a competent chat application, unlike my impression of Matrix.

I think a nice, lean-but-glossy desktop client (we already have Conversations on mobile) would be really good for the platform. It's a lot easier to fight network effects if the end-user-experience is tangibly better (and you can do a LOT better than the current incumbents that are Slack and Discord.)

feanaro7• 6 years ago

There are several Matrix projects that are quite full-featured and were built by a ~single person. Leveraging an appropriate SDK makes it feasible.

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

Most of them in alpha state, with some functionality - read not all XEP implemented ;)

remram4• 6 years ago

If you use an SDK, you're not implementing the protocol or any XEP, and therefore it's not a testament to how easy that is to do.

kitkat_new2• 6 years ago

It doesn't look like an insurmountable effort from one person to support the XEPs required to create a competent chat application, unlike my impression of Matrix.

Could you explain how you got this particular impression?

jiofih• 6 years ago

How come there hasn’t been a single really good implementation of it (besides defunct google chat), with presence, synchronized read receipts etc in the past decade?

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

Yes, there has: https://conversations.im/

EDIT: more to read:

https://blog.wirelessmoves.com/2020/05/xmpp-voice-and-video-...

https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternat...

sweden4• 6 years ago

That statement doesn't reflect the sad state of XMPP clients available nowadays.

I used to run my own XMPP server for years before moving on to Matrix and the reality was that the only good client was Conversations for Android. There wasn't a single one for Linux desktop that felt modern and up to speed with the latest XEPs.

And let's not even mention trying to get multiple clients supporting the same history with encryption enabled, that was super chaotic.

I'm really glad I abandoned my XMPP server in favor of Matrix. Matrix is modern and it just works and setting up a Synpase server is way easier than setting up a Prosody server.

MattJ1007• 6 years ago

When was "nowadays"? Gajim and Dino are definitely as decent as any native apps available for Matrix.

Sorry you feel that way about Prosody. If you have specific feedback we're always looking to improve the setup experience.

Snikket (briefly mentioned in the post) is an attempt to bundle everything you need for a modern communication server into a single package (e.g. automatic certs and stuff that you need for audio /video) out of the box. Maybe it sounds like it would suit you more.

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

I'm one of them, and I love it. Desktop clients are lagging in support compared to Conversations[^1] on Android, but even Pidgin can be flogged into an acceptable state[^2] - no video or audio though, I couldn't get that working, unlike with Prosody and Conversations[^3].

The thing with XMPP vs Matrix is weight: and XMPP server is featherweight compared to Matrix due to their different nature, so I honestly believe that XMPP still has a future.

(And maybe one day, Pidgin 3 will see the light[^4])

[^1]: https://conversations.im/

[^2]: https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

[^3]: https://gist.github.com/petermolnar/10d815eae0b7cbda2b1e5948...

[^4]: https://pidgin.im/development/building/3.0.0/

MattJ1007• 6 years ago

Yeah, for desktop I'd generally recommend Gajim (recent versions) or Dino (younger project, but progressing well). I personally use a console client (poezio).

XMPP has evolved a lot over recent years, but many folk still judge it by the state of Pidgin (where development is focusing on their big 3.0 rather than catching up with modern messaging features) or with the features XMPP had in 2006.

kitkat_new2• 6 years ago

and XMPP server is featherweight compared to Matrix due to their different nature

I agree that Synapse, the only currently available Matrix server is resource heavy, but I would not extrapolate this to the future of Matrix servers.

There is still quite some optimization possible.

swsieber2• 6 years ago

Dendrite is the next big thing right? Written in Rust? I'd be curious to see how the performance is there with it being in Rust and a rewrite/new implementation that can learn from experience.

sweden4• 6 years ago

XMPP is featherweight compared to Matrix because it does less things than Matrix.

Having a gigantic group chat with hundreads of people, with encryption, history and media synchronized between everyone without relying on a centralized server is something that XMPP doesn't even try to solve. Matrix does.

Prosody is a great project, I used to run my own Prosody server before moving on to Matrix. But people shouldn't lose perspective of the state of the protocol.

XMPP is okay if you plan to chat with a few people individually that are willing to spend time choising the right client with the right plugins and if you don't care about modern features but anything beyond than that and it becomes a huge headache.

MattJ1007• 6 years ago

We care about modern features, and are adding new ones continuously.

You're right that Matrix focuses on a distributed design where no single server is responsible for a room. XMPP doesn't focus on this (though there are XEPs for it, I don't know of any use of them outside of military deployments).

The "everything everywhere" eventual consistency approach Matrix takes means it is resilient for sure, but it's not always a desirable feature. The IETF recently trialled Matrix and were caught out by this behaviour: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/bdGVrXm7...

It can raise questions about data ownership and retention.

I am happy both protocols exist, and bridges between them exist. For my use cases I am sticking with XMPP.

YarickR2• 6 years ago

Absolutely love what you're doing, and I may come to you later to discuss possible commercial support and collaboration. Right now I'w working on a Prometheus to XMPP gateway with advanced filtering capabilities ( my idea is monitoring and alerting loop has to be tight , so you need means to deliver alerts using only things under your control), and XMPP is the right choice for this task, and I’m using Prosody as an alert delivery server component, with Conversation as a mobile client, and Dino on desktop.

MattJ1007• 6 years ago

Sounds interesting :)

Long before Prometheus was a thing I was working on a project to tunnel metrics in realtime over XMPP. I used it for some personal monitoring but never got around to polishing and publishing it.

These days it totally makes sense to bridge with Prometheus or equivalents.

profsnuggles• 6 years ago

I'm running ejabberd now, it's been fine for me. Years ago I found it much easier to get all the XEPs conversations wanted working with it. Everything I needed was built into ejabbered and not all the prosody modules I needed were packaged for debian.

What is the landscape like now? I want to be convinced to switch, what does prosody do better?

MattJ1007• 6 years ago

I'm a Prosody developer. If you're happy with ejabberd, that's fine by me! It used to be a real pain to set up and maintain (one reason we started Prosody), but both ejabberd and Erlang have made progress in that area recently.

Prosody has a strong community and one of our priorities is keeping stable, lightweight, and easy to extend and experiment with.

We are aware that some useful/popular modules are still in the community repository. We polish and merge new ones with every major release. As detailed in the blog post we are adding a simple way to fetch and install community modules to a Prosody installation.

Contrary to popular belief, XMPP is always evolving and adding new features, so this is our way of ensuring you can always keep up with new stuff even if it's not in a release yet.

We have a chat, feel free to hang out and ask questions: https://prosody.im/discuss

kevans91• 6 years ago

Huh, cool!

Are all Prosody modules pure-lua, or can/do some have a C/binary component to them? I note that the API documentation describes only lua bits, at least.

ofrzeta• 6 years ago

Prosody is also used by the Jitsi videoconferencing solution.

How Prosody developers spent 2020

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