XMPP Service Operators - 2022-08-17

Licaon_Kter: conversations is down

sachin: been down for most of the day, seems it was a hardware issue, waiting for replacement parts I am guessing.

Ohh okay.

I had to make my account with another provider. Never thought you need contingency plan

it has probably been discussed but has the following ever been tried? instead of having people run their own servers with their own configs, have a pool of servers that all run the same software/configs, and when users signup they're randomized across the pool and if a server admin wants to leave the pool they just hand off data to another pool member? kind of like how ntp.org and opennic work?

just to minimize the amount of people on a select few servers

I think the real solution is just to convince everyone to run their own server

But that is a pretty good idea, could be a stop-gap

Sapotaceae: ntp.org does not convey such sensitive data. Would it be acceptable for people to trust a pool of admins? I don't believe so. But on the opposite an admin could run multiple servers with failover if the software allows for it (shall be modular and designed for it)

do people already know trust the admins of the existing public instances?

s/know/not/

Sapotaceae: they should :-) Depends on threat model. But you're right, there's room for a lot of use cases. ✏

that just leads into: what is being done to reduce the need to trust the server?

Sapotaceae: that's a good question but maybe there's nothing more to do on the protocol side... Rather always use e2ee (for private exchanges) + Tor if you don't trust the admin.

Sapotaceae: Maybe one improvement to submit to implementations: a user should generate unique on-demand JIDs matched to his primary identity so that: - he would not risk to share his identity publicly - he could revoke it - the admins could not draw evolved contact graphs

That could be an evolution of the "invite" links

Silence had an implementation of that: where it would make an account on a random server and share the jid out of band over e2e sms, and then future messages would be e2e over xmpp

Sapotaceae: ever had?

never merged

Ah, the PR

https://github.com/SilenceIM/Silence/pull/390

kind of great and managed the issue if xmpp was down

kind of goes full circle

Conversations is back again