XMPP Service Operators - 2019-08-13

Interesting. Well, I spoke with the guys over at matrix and they told me that for their video conferencing, they are actually using jitsi meet, which I know uses XMPP/Jingle under the hood for signaling

Right now, my debate is between ircv3 vs xmpp. I have several complaints about XMPP, have these been resolved or can they be fixed easily?

The first is, chatsecure and monal on iOS both can't handle MUCs properly. monal has some issue with not supporting MUC MAM, so you don't get push notifications or offline messages delivered after returning online

ChatSecure on the other hand has some bug that causes its notifications to get repeated 10x for a single MUC message. In a single day I accumulated 5,000 push notifications

The other issue is that carbons support seemed really sketchy, since bitlbee, pidgin, adium all lacked working carbons support. Gajim too had some hiccups although my friend says it was resolved in the latest update

I think the XMPP server sends a stanza back when a message has been received by the server, but what I really need is a stanza sent from the recipient of the message saying the message was read. "Message delivered" is quite different from "Message Read" -- the former doesn't really guarantee the message was delivered, as there's a lot that go wrong from the server to the recipient

Finally, I notice that for many clients -- mcabber, conversations, monal, and converse.js -- if you are offline for a long period of time (1 week or more), old messages, even private messages, are lost. Perhaps this is related to MAM purging old historical contents? I'm not sure if the fault here lies with the clients, prosody, or a poor configuration on my part

With all these headaches, I am wondering whether or not it might be simpler and more robust to just build my chat app on top of IRCv3, since the protocol is much more straightforward, and I don't have to deal with XML.

aj: are you running your own server? I think when I was configuring mine, there was an option for purging mam messages after a period of time. it may be the server you're using (or whatever you've configured) is purging them after 1 week or so

I dunno about the rest, though. I use gajim on Linux and conversations on Android and both of those seem to be working fine as best I can tell

Allie: Yes, I'm running prosody

I think yes possibly prosody was purging old MUC chats. I changed the config just now. But I'm still running into the other issues

I think for "message read" that's something the client has to request? but I don't know that the recipient has to honor it

Yeah. I'm willing to modify/fork an existing xmpp client to implement that feature

based on my research now, it seems like once ircv3 gets more adoption, it will basically offer everything that I needed from xmpp

maybe, although ircv3 hasn't really progressed much in the last few years from what I've seen

Does XMPP still receive any commercial support/financial backing for their projects? I know matrix recently got some large million dollar grant

Ircv3 progress is a bit slow admittedly, but I think their standards have at least agreed on the most important features

Does anyone know if XMPP supports a way to indicate that the recipient has *read* a message? (as opposed to merely delivering the message to the XMPP server)

aj: there is xep0333 (which conversations uses, but only for 'received' iirc. it supports 'displayed' as well and conversations flags that in case a client asks it to do so) for that use case.

aj: there are three incomplete clients for iOS, some shitty old pc clients (which people use and still complain about) and a small number of okayish clients. I'd be surprised to see another non-commercial community (without generous financial funding, ircv3) problems like that although they already have to reinvent the wheel...

Ah, hmm thanks ibikk

Yes emias suggested XEP 0333, and he said that conversations supports it

IRCv3 has yet to support this, unfortunately. I think on their github page they are still debating it

Right now my conclusion is that the XMPP ecosystem is more complete, but I think IRCv3 will be much easier to build and support later on

I keep hearing about how XMPP is still being used by major corporations but I think, even if such is the case, they clearly aren't releasing their code back as foss...

because the XMPP ecosystem that I'm aware of is quite broken

aj: it depends on usecase, major corp might not have your need of XEPs

aj: did you see https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2019-2448-the_state_of_the_xmpp_community ?

let me take a look

interesting

Daniel Gultsch, he is the lead dev of conversations I think?

I remember seeing that name somewhere

true

iNPUTmice in certain rooms

Ah, nice, thanks

Is XMPP still getting any corporate sponsorships for development?

I remember many corporations used xmpp internally in the 2010-2015 era but they have moved on since

aj, define "XMPP"

the XSF has sponsors, individual projects may or may not have sponsors or finance themselves via commercial contracts

e.g. Conversations (which has both at the moment)

ah, conversations has corporate sponsorship? hm

I'm thinking mostly of the open source projects and the standards committee

I imagine that corporations are using XMPP internally but if they're not releasing any code, then it's of no use to me

Conversations has a grant at the moment for implementing A/V, and some money comes in from commercial requests

oh nice

How about prosody/ejabberd? and the various other clients?

Conversations seems to be the only functional xmpp client, tbh

ejabberd is a project of Erlang Solutions, which is a company

opinions differ on that one

I seem to notice a pattern where developers flock towards a new protocol, work on it and get it 80% complete, then move on to the next thing before actually finishing it

I don’t think a client which takes hours to be usable just because I’m not always-on is particularly functional ✏

that’s certainly true

aj: https://nlnet.nl/project/Conversations/ ✏

jonas’, ejabberd is a product of Process One, which is a company

MongooseIM is the server from Erlang Solutions

(originally a fork of ejabberd, but I believe it's quite different these days)

MattJ, oh, I confused that, sorry

there seems to be a pattern that xmppds get forked into things starting with `M`

:)

aj: your perspective is interesting, I use XMPP extensively in a family context where irc wouldn't make much sense, and I don't see IRCv3 changing anything about that. Then XMPP has lots of goodies and real 1:1 support, among stuff that can make it appealing to the average user (which I doubt IRC ever aims at having). If anything, my experience with operating two XMPP servers over several years has been boring: ejabberd is dead simple to self-host while supporting millions of simultaneous users on some instances. It's the kind of serious software I'd wish to see more of.

jonas’: are you saying it's time for mrosody?

mmmjabberd

migase

m-penfire

Ge0rG, itym Metronome

jonas’: I don't think so

M-M-Link?

Then again you can't fork M-Link ...

M-M-M-Multi Kill!

s/Multi/Monster/

Damn. I'm getting old.

This is unreal.

aj: M-Link and Tigase are commercially backed servers as well, the latter is Open Source. The company behind M-Link has an Open Source client as well: https://swift.im/swift.html

Development of Swift isn't terribly active though.

😪

Ge0rG: 🙂👍