jdev - 2020-04-04

finally i have some time to get a bit into gateway stuff

the XEP says a client can add the gateway to its roster

Gajim does that, and i never found a use for that

now i can chat with the gateway?

one thing that is useful, is its an entry point into issuing adhoc commands, but in Gajim you can do this from other parts of the application as well

lovetox: there is another benefit to that: the gateway is automatically receiving your presence updates

ah ok so he relates my presence then to the other service

But it would also get presence for every contact it adds

ok thats a reason to have it in the roster internally, is there a reason to expose this as UI contact in the roster?

Sometimes there are ad-hoc commands or other actions you can take

While not a gateway, I have some pubsub services that works a bit like chat bots, and it's annoying when clients decide to hide them or prevent sending messages to them

ok lets say its a gateway for facebook

facebook has a kind of roster

if i register there, the gateway sends me presences of all the users on my facebook roster

then i can add them to my roster

if i unregister from the transport i have to remove all the contacts from my roster

Didn't Gajim support roster item exchange?

There's also a thing where the transport is allowed direct access to your roster by the server.

Zash is this another XEP?

lovetox: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0321.html

The other was https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0144.html

thanks

hm, how can i keep track to what transports im registered?

say i register to 5 transports, then i clear all my application data, reset my client, and login the first time again

now the server sends me my roster, but i cant really know what of these contacts are gateways

i would have to disco info every single contact

can i assume that all transport JIDs are only domains?

so dont contain an @

lovetox: Not sure if there are transports of this kind that are not bare host JIDs, however there may be bare host JIDs in the roster that are not transports.

I suppose you'll have to disco#info to be sure

yeah, but at least i dont have to disco info my whole roster

The address of a gateway itself SHOULD be a hostname only, and that hostname SHOULD NOT be supplemented with a resource identifier when referring to the gateway's address

so i guess SHOULD is fine enough for me

You could also guess that it's a gateway if you also have a bunch of bare jids from the same domain.

for now i plan, if its only a bare jid, then disco info, if it is a gateway send a iq:register to see if im registered

or i can assume from the fact that i have a active subscription that im registered

as XEP says on unregister the gateway should send unsubscribe

ok first transport i look into twitter from spectrum2

and it sends me a presence with a caps node https://gajim.org

hm and spectrum2 project seems not very active

lovetox: cheogram.com is a transport I (and probably a lot of people) add and use from gajim

Gajim is the only client that properly marks contacts from it with a mobile phone icon

https://jmp.chat for a free trial if you want to play with it

thanks moparisthebest will try

moparisthebest, is there also something like jmp for non-us?

if i use this to send a sms to someone where i live, and they answer they probably pay much because they are sending sms to the US

You can send/recieve with non-us/Canada numbers but they haven't had luck finding providers in other countries

Everything they've found is much much more expensive

yeah

i looked it up its 7 cents from my country to that number

lovetox: xmpp:discuss@conference.soprani.ca?join they have a wiki page where they've documented the providers they have found but I can't find it at the moment

foundit on their wiki thanks

I did hack up Conversations to provide a similar UI using the number on your phone but I need to revisit that approach, probably conversations fork :'(

Are there not flat rate tarifs in the US for sms?

i understand that its nice to write from a xmpp clients sms

but i dont know if i would pay for that

if i can write sms from my smartphone for "free"

as in i already pay a flatrate

In the US most SMS plans are just unlimited everything for 1 price

but seems there are some people who pay for that, otherwise the service would not exist

but are they actually unlimited?

So if you use the last 3 commits from https://github.com/moparisthebest/Conversations/commits/sms and https://github.com/moparisthebest/xmpp-echo-self you can have the same experience anywhere with your existing number

Less bells and whistles, no SIP etc, but at least I don't need to use a damn phone keyboard

Zash: for my use yes, usually they have a fine print limiting you to a few thousand I guess

i wonder what keeps me from registering for a new phone number every 30 days

if i own a domain and server, i could register a new user every 30 day

Likely nothing, they are more FOSS guys than businessmen :)

moparisthebest: You reminded me of how annoying telcos are, and how annoyed I am by not being able to pay for what I use, with only variations of "unlimited (but not really)" to choose from

I miss pay-as-you-go :(

lovetox, I think there is much knowledge about how gateways/transports are used in PSI's codebase (and probably gajim's too)

at least when I think at the era where transports where widely used to bridge to ICQ, MSN, etc. those where the clients you would use

I still look back at the time when gajim introduced the mata-contact feature in the roster, that was really great!

yeah i still think about how to use meta-contacts in a more useful way ✏

its kind of outdated now

There are still those with multiple JIDs, and bridges are apparently coming back for another round

The problem now with transports is to actually find ones that you can develop against

transports that are good and actively maintained

Zash, of course but how would that meta contact work in practice

of course i can group multiple jids into one

but now most of the time all JIDs are online

compared to 10 years ago where only one was online when you were at work, and one when you were at home

so the client always knew, ok i send the message to the online jid

but now with multiple online contacts, its seems weird to spread the messages to multiple devices

lovetox, I had a lot of contacts with MSN, ICQ, simultanously online ~15 years ago

metacontacts IIRC made the roster much more accessible

im not talking about the user perspective, of course one contact is nicer then 3

but is it not weird to send messages to the more "active" jid

if both are online

and spreach history over different clients

that are not even synced, they are on different networks

*spread

Maybe bring back the resource locking thing? :)

I guess it'll be annoying to have MAM stuff spread over multiple users too

So, the lession we learned was that transports will never work perfectly.

Their purpose is to reach those who has yet to see the light while letting you stay in the comforts of XMPP

and it becomes more compicated with E2E in the picture

Making it a touch annoying is probably fine, you can't avoid it, and if it encourages switching to native XMPP then that's great

imagine you put one skype contact and one xmpp contact into one meta contact

one has E2E the other not

Ugh

and the client switching between them based on activity

If you use E2EE, always use E2EE

Unless the user otherwise I guess

to solve stuff like that it gets so complex and you have to handle so many cases

that i just question is it worth it?

only thing i could see, is that metacontact is like a group thingy, where we just show the user, these JIDs belong all to the same person

but in the end letting the user choose to which address to write

not trying to do some magic

and merging history from all 3

so if the contact writes from any of his devices, it shows in the same chat window

where did I put my phone?

Dunno how other phones handle it, but Sailfish has a selector thing for different contact methods in the chat/sms where you can pick which phone number to send to. (or XMPP address, or other methods)

yeah something like that i imagine also

No idea if it automagically switches if a reply is received from a different method

yeah we could do something like that, switch automatically to the jid we received a message from

so a bit of magic is possible

hm i heard some do purge offline messges and only sync with mam

but to be safe i should only do this if i know mam is activated on my account

was there any gotcha with enablind carbons?

or is simply enabling before sending first presence enough