XMPP Service Operators - 2021-03-22

jonas’, never encountered that, did you report it?

Reporting to jitsi-meet is quite pointless as they will throw away all your efforts for the report by stalebotting…

Link Mauve, no, never bothered. I don’t want to interact with a discourse nor did the issue tracker seem really open to reports of non-(jitsi-)standard use. ✏

Martin: what is stalebotting

If they do not touch that issue for weeks or so it'll be automatically be closed by a bot which makes it a "won't fix" -> closed.

So they are WONTFIXing interoperability issues

So if it's something which they do not consider important enough to take immediate action your issue get's automatically closed.

Which is kind of a slap in your face as you took time to report and then it's not even a human telling you they won't fix it but just a bot which closes after time x has passed.

yep

I am immediately discouraged from reporting when I see such a staleclose bot

Oh right, I’ve seen that on other projects which I definitely avoid to contribute to.

I didn’t know they did too. :|

Martin: > Which is kind of a slap in your face as you took time to report and then it's not even a human telling you they won't fix it but just a bot which closes after time x has passed. That depends You took time because you wanted It's kinda odd to force them to do something now just because... Better use the forum

I don't want to force them to implement it and I am okay with "sorry, not on our roadmap, I'll close it" but stalebotting is something which I really don't like.

And I might use a proper forum but not that disgust thing.

Anyway, you don't need to convince me of something, I just don't bother them with bug reports or ideas so they are not annoyed by me and I'm not annoyed by the stalebot → win-win.

they don’t seem to have a stalebot though

looking at issues like https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/8049

They don't need a stalebot to...ignore :))

Eg. Look at the dates https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-sctp/pull/3 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-srtp/pull/12 These were/are needed for arm64 or CentOS6 ✏

Or this one, 2017!!!! https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/issues/512 And they "forget" to push tags https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6418

> What I like about Metronome is the wide support for XEPs and microblogging related stuff as it's being used with GNU Social (and PeerTube and JSXC). I'm not seeing a list of supported XEPs or much of any information, really, on Snikket's site. i had some doubts, probably wrong ones... is Metronome an active project ?

Is Maranda an active human? ✏

Ji4 Metronome is very active. xmpp:grimoire@muc.metronome.im?join Some of the website documentation was just updated yesterday, even!

I really strongly disagree with mattj's snicket initiative. I get it, advertise it in a shady way like the techbros do to see if it's gets more popular, but it misses something. The big tech platforms aren't popular BECAUSE they advertise in a shady way, they are popular because most of their budget _IS_ advertising

Discord is a piece of shit and everyone knew it from day one, but they payed a bunch of youtube "influencers" to shill it nonstop

Same thing for nordvpn

tom: watch your language

What? Which word?

Crap?

The other thing about it is because that's who they choose to pay to shill, their platform is mostly filled with little kids and morons

And it's kind of gained a reputation for that

FWIW I don't care too much about people in this community liking or not liking Snikket, since it's not aimed at existing XMPP users (many are mostly happy with the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem)

Just as I'm happily using my console client, even though Snikket is not likely to ever have one :)

And apart from advertising (FWIW Snikket does not do paid advertising) there are real UX issues that need solving, such as XMPP being close to unusable on iOS (a situation that is thankfully improving)

But many people here probably hate Apple, and think people should move to Linux phones before switching away from proprietary messaging silos

MattJ: I admire your patience, I would just have said "You don't have to agree…"

But tom, one thing to consider here is how non-techies will be communicating IRL or even between each other online. They will call it by it's brand name and there is one uniform application to use across platforms. Both arguments have merrit. Time will tell if the group behind Snikket loses their way or buys what some vulture capitalist feeds them and decides at the time that the money given to the project will overall be more beneficial. Not everyone/thing that sells out /gets bought out does so without regard to what they started. Often, they're reassured that their vision and wishes will remain. Just look at all the BS that happens in the music industry to everyone below the top 10% most popular artists. The industry promises them all these things, signs contracts, and afterwards the artists get screwed one way or another. I'm sure the same exact thing happens all the time with software. I.e. last.fm ???

You make a good argument thndrbvr, but in my experience non-techies usually ask their techie friends for their advice.

thndrbvr, the legal structure behind the Snikket org intentionally has no shares, and is therefore incompatible with the VC fundraising route

tom: > You make a good argument thndrbvr, but in my experience non-techies usually ask their techie friends for their advice. Or they don't because WA is so easy so why bother with Snikkets or Siskins? _I know better than the paranoid techie_

MattJ: I'm curious; What do you think of Purism's marketing?

> thndrbvr, the legal structure behind the Snikket org intentionally has no shares, and is therefore incompatible with the VC fundraising route It's anonymous donors all the way down... :)

If they have any. Most "techies" these days are "gamers" who use discord. Lol. To most, a "techy" these days isn't someone who's generally a computer/GNU+Linux/FLOSS/hacker/etc enthusiast. It's just someone who can swap out a video card and set up a WiFi network.

> _I know better than the paranoid techie_ Not sure if your friends really talk like that but in general I see people just don't care about privacy/security etc.

That is sadly true thndrbvr

A large portion does care Wiktor, they just are suffering from defeatism and think privacy is some unrealisticlly unobtainable thing or idealistic and not practical

Wiktor: People do often say they care but can't be bothered to truly do anything about it. So many people feel defeated and overwhelmed because these evils are so prevelent.

So they give in

Also

tom, I'm not very familiar with their marketing. Their homepage looks okay.

People don't know where or how to begin and are often so entrenched that much of their information is already out there. It's their kids we have to save XD

good points. In my experience people would use "the snikkets and siskins" if they were reliable. Unfortunately the gold standard of Conversations seems to be still unmatched on other platforms (from my friends experience from 2020, yours may vary) :)

When they get swindled and tricked by fake privacy initiatives like firefox that claim how they are so anti "big browser" and "the little guys" whatnot, but then find out just how much telemetry is in firefox

» <MattJ> tom, I'm not very familiar with their marketing. Their homepage looks okay. Snicket kinda reminds me of Purism vs Pinephone's marketing

I'm still waiting for Purism to finish setting up their XMPP server.... They got Matrix-Synapse running and forked a client. I think they're waiting for Chatty to fully support everything? Never used it.

Are they going to? I see a lot of negative comments directed towards them on the fediverse (activitypub) over that

Going with matrix

Or PopOS

tom, I personally follow Pine64's projects more closely (I was a backer of their initial SBC crowdfunding, long before Pinephone became a thing)

Doesn't Firefox handle most of it's own telemetry? And not share anything with anyone. I don't have much problem with that but, that's also because I feel like my browser setup and usage is a bit atypical so naturally I think it's the best and want them to make my way the default :P

Purism has their own competing thing with the pinephone, their own privacy phone

But it's priced more in line with an iphone competitor than the pinephone

Disclaimer: I pre-ordered the L5 USA. I'm stoked.

I think the Librem One promo video they made is amusing. They seem genuine with what they're doing. Pretty stubborn about keeping things... Pure. Open hardwre, open software, open protocols. They're losing a lot of money on software development and hardware testing to make it happen. At this point, I just hope they stay in business. COVID sux0rz.

thndrbvr: no, https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html

Pings out to google

So, that explains the forks.

There's also the organizational problems written up here https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html

Yes i'm sure you can hack up a version with patches and user.jses but the point is they market themselves as a privacy respecting product, and then they do all that

They get, what? 300,000,000 $US from Google? That kind of money tends to make most people feel like they owe someone something.

And firefox by default is absolutely NOT private

So what do you think about Brave, then?

It's just reskinned google chromium with their own spying added on top

is there anything except "firefox" and "reskinned google chromium" out there?

Yeah, Falkon and Epiphany from KDE and GNOME respectively.

Oh, Otter Browser I think is something else. Supposed to be like Opera was. Qutebrowser I think is another one if you're familiar with Vi keyboard shortcuts. Does Palemoon count? Forked from FF many years ago and has been growing in it's own direction with some compatibility for old style addons.

thndrbvr, falkon is built on QtWebEngine, which is hte Chromium engine ✏

» <jonas’> is there anything except "firefox" and "reskinned google chromium" out there? There's Netsurf

so it hinges on googles support at least

Links2

Xlinks2

And text browsers like w3m, lynx

There's also dillo, but it's a bit weird

» <thndrbvr> Yeah, Falkon and Epiphany from KDE and GNOME respectively. With an asterisk. Those are "QT WebEngine" which is Google Chromium with QT's own sauce

Brave you don't have to share data. Most stuff is done locally. They also don't share any information and seem to do a good job anonymizing data they do receive and I think they delete it after a short period.

Otter browser is qt webkit or qt webengine

Webkit at least isn't google chromium

It's more closely related to apple safari

Which is based on KHTML

the webkit integration of Qt is dead

People keep saying that but it's not like it's stopped existing

And last I heard Chromium had about 90% market share. So. Really, our best bet is to help Mozilla not go out of business because then the big G have a monopoly on the Internet even more so.

Then we've lost thndrbvr if Mozilla Corporation is our best bet

Mozilla can go and die. They have been dead to me since 52.9ESR

A pathetic excuse for freedom and user agency in the web

That's what I'm saying. And my other point is that goog and microshaft and others are big contributors to mozilla. If they had more funding from The People and smaller orgs then they'd have more standing power. If the big G decides to pull funding, that alone would be devastating.

Sorry, so negative. Probably off topic by now. Good chat nontheless

That's nice but realistically speaking it'd be godsawful if they did die. How long do we have to wait and watch the world collaspse with proprietary, centralized software before alternatives can take over?

But thndrbvr, Mozilla has betrayed their user's trust and alienated their loyal users

They don't even try to be their own thing anymore, they just try to imitate chrome

In some ways yes. In others, I like the things they're doing with containers that now also containerize cookies etc. That and the build in malware and tracker blocking. It may not be as heavy handed as some addons but it doesn't have to be. I think those things are great for protecting mainstream users.

Part of me only thinks the only reason google is still around is so they can point the Mozilla and say "look, we have competition" when congress comes knocking; but the reality is Google pulls Mozilla by a leash around the neck. The W3C died with HTML5 and encrypted media extensions breaking their 30+ year tradition of only standardizing by consensus and what Mozilla does now is just play catchup or replicate chrome

thndrbvr: they COULD have fixed the issue of third part cookies for DECADES NOW

Go look up the many RFC revisions for cookies for that story

Thanks to netscape, and mozilla's refusal to fix their implementation of cookies (third party cookies were never supposed to be a thing) gave birth to a lot of the tracking widespread today

» That and the build in malware and tracker blocking. I except they whitelist a large swatch of tracking and ad networks

I really don't know what vanilla chromium is like so I can't comment but I'm not sure it's all imitation. Some things are just things to be developed into a browser and I wouldn't be surprized if the devs from one are talking to the other about stuff, sharing ideas. And users are sending the same messages to both.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200411051257/https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection/unblocked

Yeah, like I said, I don't think it should be expected that a mainstream browser flatout blocks all ads. They are a valid way of monetizing a website. It's just a matter of how they're being done. I.e. a self-hosted thing maybe with Adzark or regular banners + links would be acceptable as no data is collected and shared. That doesn't need to be blocked. As someone who is slowly building a social network, I plan on having ads by community members & bands. I need to make money because it costs a whole lot to run a site with a social network, chat, music, etc

Hey, as noted, this conversation is now particularly off-topic... if anyone has suggestions for a better venue for this discussion, feel free to suggest it

thndrbvr: lets continue this chat some other time somewhere else

The Offtopic room was mentioned before

What is it again?

Wait. what? Jitsi DMCA's you if you competitively interoperate?

nobody said that

Somebody did say that, but they're wrong.

Or suggested that they might anyways, but it's nosense.

» competitively interoperate what a world we live in where this is neccecary

people experiencing any issues with hetzner?

hetzner robot websites is not loading here (Portugal) and my server is also inaccessible

I’m writing you from a box at hetzner via an XMPP server running on another box at hetnzer

Hetzner server up, logged into Robot ok

hmm, strange

Fire?

probably some international routing issue

Cool

Space pirates

hmm, Robot is back up but the server doesn't respond to pings, so something is quite off 😕 perhaps the SSD failed. my first hetzner machine, just been online for 2 weeks ,would be quite unlucky :| I got it from the auction though

Auction?

Licaon_Kter, best way to get really good deals on real dedicated servers https://www.hetzner.com/sb

I ran one for years, it was great, occasionally a hard drive would fail and they'd replace it promptly and I'd only need a reboot (ran software raid)

when I needed significantly less resources I downgraded to their "cloud" (VPS) offering, after some rough initial bumps, it's been fine too

I know this is off topic here, but Hetzner gave me a KVM console but it doesn't seem to run in any ofthe browsers I have (firefox with ublock, chromium, google chrome stable, firefox without ublock)

The documentation says I need Java to run the KVM Console, but I just get a black screen saying nothing about Java and I have several Java versions installed on my computer. I didn't know Java in the browser was still a thing.. Does anyne have experience with the KVM consoles?

Is this an old school applet? Try icedtea. I think that's what I've used then just downloaded them and run them locally in the past

steven, you might want to try the rescue system instead, it grants SSH access. but you’ll have to mount the disks manually then… syslog is still oftentimes useful then

yeah well I just saw the "order manual harware reset" option and then I got the e-mail about the KVM console. I didn't really know such a console existed 😀 but it seems useful to be able to login into the system