XSF Discussion - 2018-01-16

hello is there a way to find out the total amount of active xmpp users worldwide? I know about the prosody monitor https://network.trashserver.net/ but I would like to know if there is any estimation of the deep net...

Mattj could you help with that question?

MattJ

It'd be really hard to do flo , could maybe stalk cert transparency logs until Feb 28th and look for the number of XMPP servers then multiply by a few for users or something

You can guesstimate the number of servers. Users are harder.

moparisthebest "Any list of XMPP servers, clients or libraries will, due to the dynamic and evolving nature of the XMPP market, be out of date almost as soon as it’s published." Maybe it would be worth a study to ask the biggest players for numbers.

Guess a distribution curve and multiply by the number of guesstimated servers

Yea that will tell you how many users are on those servers

There are things like the Debian popcon and such that can provide some numbers

If you want to try the cert transparency logs though you better do it quick the free lunch ends Feb 28th

waitwhat

Zash: that's the go live date for wildcard certs at letsencrypt

Today every xmpp domain you get a cert for is in the log, when *. example.org is issued you just have to guess

But certs aren't xmpp-specific in any way

But a simple DNS query to check

With any of the certstream projects

you mean srv records? those aren't required?

might as well go for one of those entire internet port scans

Yes srv and or connecting to 5222 you'd catch a good number

Can't tell how many domains though, and useless for ipv6

You would catch whatsapp on port 5222 too... I'm more interested in the numbers of alternative xmpp clients

flo: oh well for that just search GitHub

moparisthebest‎ how does github tell me something about the userbase of lets say conversations?

flo: sorry what are you after, number of users, number of clients, or numbers of users per client?

Because those are all different things

well users would be the most interesting thing, but the hardest to find out...

just look at the prosody monitor, something is still better than nothing

https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/15/hidden-camera-hundreds-of-twitter-employees-paid-to-view-everything-you-post-online-including-private-sex-messages/

Is this is what passes for shocking news

"Twitter has... What you send to Twitter"

Then XMPP has no chance on the "it's better for privacy" front

For the majority it is not better, everyone supports e2ee already

lots of SPAM again the last 2 days :(

I'm planning to move to Matrix, less spam there

http://www.managingcommunities.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/not-sure-if-trolling.jpg "not sure if trolling or being serious"

well zinid privacy and e2ee overlap a bit but it's not the whole story, no commercial walled gardens offer the kind of privacy xmpp does

my point was if the average user is surprised that twitter has what they send to twitter, they have no concept of the term privacy and selling xmpp to them based on that is impossible

the less nice way to put it is you'd have to sell xmpp to those morons by saying it has prettier stickers

It's hard to imagine why we'd have a hard time selling XMPP to anyone, if we consider people who like prettiness to be morons.

My Grandmother recently got an iPad for christmas. She had no experience with computers before and hasn't even used a typewriter once in her life (neither have I but thats not the point :D). I did not even think about installing her an XMPP client, because there is *no* simple to use client that I know of (let alone for iOS).

I kinda think Swift is as simple as it can sensibly be, for the very basic cases, but certainly the more complex stuff isn't as straightforward as it could be.

well conversations is simple and pretty, but if you are trying to sell it to someone over whatsapp, I think all I can come up with immediatly is 'privacy' and for morons who are surprised twitter has what they send them, that's a non-argument

Originally my brother installed her Facetime, but then she couldn't call me, so I installed her Wire instead. Even Wires interface is too complicated (too many buttons and thingies to accidentally tap on). In the end we stayed with Wire, but my brother put the ipad in "guided access" (he basically blocked away many buttons and prevented wire from being closed).

I havent used swift, so I cannot tell, but conversations is certainly *not* easy to use unfortunately

at least in my opinion.

why not? my 5yo uses it to message grandma

she can't even fully read, just simple words

Swift's certainly straightforward enough for my parents, but they can use a web browser and the such too, so that's not as extreme.

Compared with relatives who're unable to work a phone.

Probably depends on the grandma. I wasn't able to teach my grandma to use a feature phone

moparisthebest, fair enough, most features of conversations are hidden away in menus, so mistake clicks are not made so easily

But then again I can't use Instagram

still, no encryption by default (I know we are getting there), and for example the green indicator thing doubling up as status indicator (if configured so) and image send button is confusing for starters

And I don't really want to learn it either because that's not my generation

You're too young to instagram?

those users don't need to worry about status ?

(no one really *needs* to from conversations honestly)

Not that I think instagram's the most enriching thing in the world, but ... yeah.

It has a very confusing interface...

moparisthebest, sure I'm nitpicking here. My point is, that XMPP could still be *even* simpler.

Kev: I was thinking I'm too old? But maybe I'm too young...

vanitasvitae, does conversations even show status without fiddling in advanced options? I didn't think it did

daniel: I think you're younger than me, and a lot of my friends use it (and going down from my age to 25 or so - I don't have many friends below that).

sure it doesn't point taken :)

But I think we might be digressing :)

As an aside, I think status needs to be seriously rethought and simplified at the protocol level - at least by convention.

Kev: maybe it's different in the UK? I dont know a single person who actually uses it on a regular basis. I always assumed it was a generation thing. But maybe it's a culture thing

moparisthebest, some time ago I installed conversations on my fathers phone. It was a hassle to explain OMEMO fingerprints to him.

It could be regional. Back in the day, whether you were MSN/ICQ/Y! etc. was heavily influenced by region.

oh I agree there vanitasvitae , I installed conversations on my mom's phone , trusted my fingerprints, and didn't mention omemo :)

vanitasvitae: I'm not convinced that e2e for all is actually the right thing to do.

Because in order for e2e to be meaningful there are some slightly tricky things that you *have* to deal with, or else have a central entity with too much control.

vanitasvitae: why did you even try to? Leave it in BTBV mode and don't bother with verification

my 5yo doesn't know about omemo either, it just works

Try to explain him, that some times (when I reinstalled conversations), the fingerprint would change, and what that means

daniel, that was back, when BTBV didnt exist

I'm a long time user lol

daniel, how do you enable that btw?

I am convinced XMPP is the *best* (or only) choice for safely creating children's accounts :) https://burtrum.org/kids_firewall.pfw.txt

Link Mauve, just dont scan somebodies fingerprint :D

Ok, but you still have to select it in the dropdown (?) menu, right?

I think no

but daniel is probably the better one to ask :D

if you mean turn omemo on, yes you still have to do that

(until feb or something? he has a plan to make it default)

Link Mauve: enable BTBV? That's enabled by default. You can disable it in the expert settings

Ok, my parents definitely didn’t do that. :)

I just enabled OMEMO for them between them and with my sister, without saying anything special about it.

I disabled OMEMO everywhere because the interop with non-OMEMO clients on the same account is terrible.

(and the pidgin-omemo-plugins mess my pidgin up badly, for some reason)

I didn’t enable it with me, because I don’t use it. :p

But they all use Conversations, and some use Dino, so that’s fine.

I would switch from gajim to dino as soon as they implement tray icon support, so that the app keeps running in the background

ha I feel like that's all that is discussed in the dino muc nowadays

the 'one true DE Gnome' dropped systray support so all other DEs should drop it, or something

I disagree, but meh

I don't think it was a GNOME thing, I think the Freedesktop spec dropped it, IIRC

GNOME and many other DEs follow that

gnome is the only one I know of without a systray

It moves faster than others, yes

also iirc Link Mauve said it won't work in wayland either

moparisthebest, my DE also doesn’t have a systray.

I haven’t had one even when I was still on X11.

I don’t have a systray either

Neither does mine (also on X11), although that might not matter much since I'm in a weird MATE/i3 mix and it's pretty heavily customized

moparisthebest, KDE and Unity were the ones who wrote a specification (hosted at fd.o) to support systray on non-X11, but with Unity moving to GNOME I’m not sure where that went.

leave my KDE alone kthx :P

Hmm?

I have been meaning to try something tiling though, maybe i3

(I was just joking around, that I want to keep my systray in KDE)

I like i3 a lot, but I've also heard good things about "awesome" (I think that's what it's called)

But i3 is firmly in the "good enough" category for me, so I haven't tried anything else

that's how I am with KDE, started with it in 2005ish and just could never switch to anything else

“20:31:17 moparisthebest> (I was just joking around, that I want to keep my systray in KDE)”, if you read what I said again, that’s exactly what I said they are doing. :p

moparisthebest, +1

SamWhited, if you like i3, awesome isn’t for you :)

(I say that as a long-time awesome user who switched to i3)

(because i3 had the single feature I always missed from awesome)

Which is? :)

SouL, more freely tiling windows. awesome has rather fixed layouts

Having workspaces switchable independencly on each monitor is pretty nice

Zash, yeah, that too

My only real problem with i3 is that I haven't found a good way to swap easily between the 1080p screen on my laptop and a 4k external monitor

(although luckily the only external monitor I use right now is also 1080p, so it stopped being a problem)

Swap how?

pluging in a 4k monitor everything on it is tiny, if I make it bigger when I unplug it the bar eats half my screen

hm, I have a similar issue with my 3k notebook screen and the 19 inch 1280×1024 external one. I use a font which is rather readable even on small sizes (one of those <http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/>)