XSF Discussion - 2018-02-11

Do whe have any "general purpose" mailing list?

I guess JUser will do

I hope many people is subscribed there

Seve/SouL, I’m not subscribed to user, what is your general purpose message?

https://www.tnhh.net/posts/google-talk.html

Nice, I haven't used hangouts enough to know how crap it is I guess

pep., there will be no Hangouts anymore

not even Allo

there will be Android Messages, the third Google's attempt to kill Facebook :)

zinid: third dozen?

yeah :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351874 so true, so sad.

so people are actually serious about paying with IM clients?!

holy fuck

Ge0rG: is this post a meme? I feel like I have seen the exact same post in every xmpp related thread on HN

jonasw: I seriously hope not :z

ugh

Slack is te best example. I know many of companies which spend thousands of $ every month for IM

well, XMPP only shows that open standards cannot compete with commercial protocols created by bussiness monsters

> By 2016 nearly everyone could [...] syncing between multiple devices tell that to my WhatsApp

I would say it can, we just need some more good clients, and make it easier to install your own server. But we are having this discussion every couple of month ;-)

Alex, but we don’t have funding for "just […] some more good clients"

> I would say it can, we just need some more good clients I think that's a contradiction: you cannot create a good client outside a monster like Google or Telegram

Not now, it's too late

its never too late

sometimes it is ;)

that's why I'm tired saying that we need to define a goal, a niche, and target it

and forget about world domination

Also if we always react to what platform do, we'll never be where these articles want us to be. Though I'm not sure I want to be anyway

federation is our big advantage

to whatever platformX do* (fling smartphone)

fking*

Alex, so how far did we get with this advantage?

flinging smartphones through windows!

Zash: I'm not sure why I still inflict this on myself

so, who will write the payment transfer XEP?

any volunteers? :)

I don’t believe in using IM for payment

so holy fuck no

jonasw, that doesn't matter, we don't even have enough competence to write such a XEP

What I was going to write. At least for me

Well JabberCoin could generate some positive press

Sometimes going with the flow is now a bad thing

daniel, I'm fine with JabberCoin btw

daniel, we have 15k servers, we can spread it really fast

Ugh

bitcoin has "only" 9k server nodes

zinid: but you can't get any transactions through 😀

blockchain!!! the solution to our identity-issue!!!k

no no no noooooooo!

guys, blockchain is not always as retarded as bitcoin, btw ;)

you can choose whatever BFT protocol you want

blockchain is not retarder, it's just that most of the people that are talking about it are retarded

*retarded

Power consumption issues?

it's good for the economy

pep., the "power consumption" is the issue of BFT protocols based on crypto computation, like bitcoin

OK. Do you have an example where it's not the case? (Genuine question) links or stuff I can lookup

pep., only academic read, alas, for example: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9

the paper itself is here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/efb1/a85cf540fd4f901a78100a2e450d484aebac.pdf

Thanks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897 discussion on the link Ge0rG posted earlier

by the way: > and make it easier to install your own server how do you imagine that? I think you still need to be a nerd to install it, you need a server with OS installed at least

that can be solved with RPi images.

but the DNS is still tricky ✏

also, XMPP servers are hard to configure because XMPP assumes complex servers (at least that was the initial moto)

Another one of them tech cycles. Complexity oscilating between clients and servers

jonasw, not sure about RPi, what target audience are we talking about? house wives or tech-inclined teenagers?

why not both?

jonasw, because I don't think a house wife can afford to install and configure RPi ;)

afford to?

*is not able to

damn, a typical (TM) internet user doesn't understand URLs, what are we talking about? :)

zinid, do something else with your sunday except making me sad pls. kthxbai :)

sorry

Oops.

> There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol

always such types of comments on ycombinator in the corresponding IM-related thread ;)

I twitched a little while reading that

Hm? Pro-Matrix as usual?

ah, sorry, I didn't copy-paste it completely: There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org).

Who could have guessed?

the only stuff comes at my mind in this moment is https://xkcd.com/927/

We need more XEPs, so we can reach XEP-0927

> All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the longest and they get the most flack for it.

another perl

Did they now?

Could someone ping the moderator of the JUser mailing list, please? I sent an email and I'm wating for it to be published.

So, I sent the following email https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/juser/2018-February/007156.html to JUser, but that's because I didn't know where would fit best. Can you guys tell me if you think I should post it in some other mailing list, please?

not sure what solution they can find with their requirements

"Stickers are available"

LOL

"FOSS server implementation"

"not tightly controlled by a single company"

so this is definitely not Matrix

Writing requirements, step 1: Pick the solution you want. 2. Describe its properties. 3. Make up additional reasons to reject all other canditates.

marc, I consider enlarged emojis to be stickers...

SaltyBones, they use the term "emojis" in other places to I guess stickers are something else (see telegram)

> Telegram- or Slack-like GUI available (e.g. user avatars next to messages, whitespace between messages)

Juser? Is anyone even subscribed to that list?

Also mailman archives are impossible to read on a mobile browser. Sigh

yeah, mailman archives look like shit from 90s

And that pastebin is even worse

from what I remember there used to be an XMPP server at kde.org, no?

allowing text reflow and zoom tends to go a long way

Bunneh: ping kde.org

Zash: Pong from kde.org in 1.916 seconds

Still appears to be

Bunneh, version kde.org

zinid: kde.org is running Prosody version 0.9.10 on Linux

so what's the problem?

IRC users

IRC users will never give up IRC (insert xkcd reference)

maybe they don't have to with a nice transport?

Good bridges to other protocols seems like an oxymoron

True, I was the author of some bridges (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Mail.ru) and it's a nightmare

IRC is just enough subtly different from MUC to make it real tricky to translate.

Yes. Though I think IRC is possible if you really know what you are doing. But anything else is just bound to fail

That's coming from someone who just implemented an SMTP2xmpp gateway. Lol

daniel, I'm waiting for the FAX2XMPP gateway to really make fun of...

I think that to get MUC to work from an IRC perspective, you have to constrain it, eg enforce the same nickname in every channel.

Probably other things that I can't think of right now

I touched IRC last time in 2004 or so, LOL

Zash: yes there is a lot of trickery to be made. But I think it would be possible.

Hm...maybe the transport should be the other way round.

Offer an IRC server that connects to MUCs.

SaltyBones: There was talk, long long ago, about adding an XMPP s2s interface to Freenode.

Zash, and? XKCD-1782 happens?

-xkcd 1782

I think trying to force users to migrate from IRC to XMPP is the same as trying to do this from XMPP to Matrix

https://community.kde.org/Matrix

LOL

> One of the most interesting features of Matrix is the native support for bridges to other protocols, such as IRC

marketing bullshit

zinid, marketing bullshit makes the world go round

zinid: Especially considering that was the original purpose of Jabber, way back in the day

SaltyBones, "world go round" = "spinning wheels"?

1999 called and said it wasn't that great an idea after all.

zinid: unfortunately a lot of people believe this bullshit. This plays a huge part in the popularity of matrix

daniel, I know :)

But you can probably just wait 5 years and see it fail

I thought they already did, but then was bought by some obscure cryptocrappy company

So only sad thing is the wasted resources that go into something that is bound to fail

I'm not talking about the money or the venture capital they receive - I don't care about that - but the volunteers that work for them

daniel, I frankly don't understand the volunteers, why they believe this shit about "open protocol", but whatever

Well people do stupid things. That's just how it is

yeah ;)

I mean think of xmpp what you want. But matrix didn't solve any of the actual problems xmpp has aside from putting a lot of venture capital into a few clients that look somewhat polished on the surface

You could have just as well put the same money into some xmpp clients

daniel, the imho only thing that matrix has is somewhat working calling.

And the aforementioned marketing...

SaltyBones: sure. That's what I meant by somewhat polished clients.

Calling is basically a client feature

Take a third of the resources they had and you could have voip in xmpp clients as well

no surprise, they have 11 full-time programmers, and how many devs do XMPP clients have?

I mean from an end user perspective that's cool and all. If you are looking for an IM solution that runs in your web browser and consumes like 2 gigabytes of RAM and that you can do voice calls with then why not use matrix

</rant>

daniel, since I don't know ANYTHING about the topic please forgive the naive question: Why do video calls not work in Conversations?

SaltyBones, because it is not implemented ;)

and complex

zinid, depends

I have a PoC

marc: are you still working on that per conversation media thing by the way?

daniel, what media thing?

ah, the shared media thing?

marc, well, it's not complex for me as well (because I wrote sip proxy, stun/turn server and an RTP translator/mixer) ;)

Show images for that conversation

Yes

marc, but I can see how hard to a regular developer voip would be

zinid: the UX is a pain

Or the ui

daniel, probably, I'm not a gui guy, so cannot say anything

zinid, the big problem for me was/is the media information mapping and some android stuff

daniel, I would like to improve it and use the database backend etc. but at the moment I'm working on xep-401

The thing for me is that I very rarely call people anyway. And if I do I just use my phone.

daniel, same for me, but I like voip just as a technology, so I have fun just implementing this stuff (server-side)

and if you don't use it and don't like it a lot, then of course there will be a lot of pain, and the resulting quality would be suboptimal, to say the least ;)

Given that xmpp is usually 10 years behind the rest of the world we might as well skip the voip thing and start developing VR stufd

*stuff

LOL

we should finish the blockchain first!

A blockchain transport!!

I mean like meeting in a virtual pub or Café I could actually get behind. If it somehow transfers you facial expression into your virtual avatar or something like that. That could actually be a pretty cool way of meeting people that is way more personal than a telephone call

And you could pay with crypto currency in that virtual pub

So win/win

daniel, regarding calling people: I agree, outside of calling the tax office I never call anybody. I do use video calls and slack conferences, though...

So it either needs video or screen sharing.... :)

For the record, we should define the XMPP URI (omemo-sid-...) for in XEP-0384

I would suggest something like xmpp:foo@bar.com?roster;omemo-sid-...