XSF Discussion - 2018-06-04

Dear XSF. We should write a blog post about how XMPP is the right solution to what's asked for by German Minsiter of Justice Katarina Barley regarding the opening of WhatsApp and other messengers.

I'd volunteer the text, but who's the right person to approve that? comms team?

Ge0rG, write the blogpost

comms and possibly board

"possibly board" frightens me.

I wouldn't be surprised if Board would decide that we can not promote XMPP because that wouldn't be neutral against other open IM protocols like SIP and Matrix.

come on

Ge0rG, I can't tell if you're just saying things like that to be provocative, or whether you really believe them. In either case I think it's sad

Haha

I know you want the same thing as I do, and I am also sad Pidgin is listed, but there is still no proposal as to any criteria by which it should be removed

I explicitly included a question about implementation neutrality in the members survey to try and resolve this kind of issue as well

It will be one of the things we talk about in the next board meeting probably, but at a glance opinion is very divided, no clear consensus

classic :)

I believe, as others have concluded also, that the XSF is simply not the right vehicle for promoting XMPP to end users

Just out of curiosity, what is/would be the right vehicle?

Anything from a group of like-minded people with free time, to a completely new foundation

I have some stuff I have been working on, which I gave a talk about at FOSDEM a few years ago

Wiktor: we need a Jabber Software Foundation

Yes, but with s/Jabber/XMPP/... ;)

s/Jabber/Brand name without trademark/

except that "we" can't even decide whether "Jabber™" is burned due to a huge trademark minefield, or still the right term

Remember to use "Open", something like "Open Communications Alliance"

Wiktor: "Jabber" is to "XMPP" what "Email" is to "SMTP+IMAP"

"Open" is so f***ing burned.

I didn't know email was a registered trademark :(

maybe jabber got so popular that the trademark would not hold... but I don't want to be the one to check it out :)

Wiktor: do you have better suggestions for a word that's assosicated with a worldwide federated IM network?

Whats… oh you said federated

Steal "Fediverse"

Fediverse still has some sub-terms, like ActivityPub (protocol), Mastodon (product)

Fediverse. I've heard that once or twice before.

Universal Chat

UChat

It's got like zero percent of brand awareness of XMPP.

Ge0rG, are you targetting people aware of XMPP or a broader audience?

people aware of jabber

I claim that sufficiently many people are aware of Jabber that we should get our in-house trademark fight solved and promote the term properly.

Ge0rG, so the solutions I see to that are 1) ignore it 2) ask Cisco to make it all ok [2a) have Cisco actually make it all ok]

Okay, personally I don't know any person that knows jabber but doesn't know xmpp, but maybe it doesn't hold "in the wild"

MattJ: ignore what?

That there is any trademark issue

That's pretty much what everyone has done so far

Wiktor, and who knows about jabber just says 'oh, I remember, something old'

Wiktor, at least here in France, and I’ve heard in Russia too, when you go around people are talking about Jabber.

Indeed

and people who know about XMPP tend to write Jabber/XMPP anyway

Yeah.

Or even just Jabber.

Yep, jabber is tainted with "old" and "doesn't work on mobile" in my experience :)

Seve/SouL, when they say that, reply with "Great, something to wear at your wedding then!" and hand them a Jabber sticker

ZIMPY!!

One way or another this foundation to promote xmpp sounds like a really good idea, 👍

zimpy the zebra?

MattJ: reading "Jabber/XMPP" hurts my eyes. every. single. time.

Ge0rG: Like GNU+Linux ?

Ge0rG, make issues which are the opposite of what one other person is doing at the moment! https://github.com/jabbercat/jabbercat/issues/89

jonasw: what? Me? Feeding the trolls?

"random> so is XMPP moving to GitLab?"

Hahaha

Why not go back to Mercurial? ;)

"back"?

I was looking to mve to another apartment, I may move to GitLab as well

Seve/SouL, good idea

if I apply that line of thought, I need $7.5e9 now.

don't go to gitlab. otherwise MS will buy it!

go to gitlab, everyone go to gitlab, and look how MS bites it’s own shiny metal thing when all the interesting stuff is gone from GitHub :)

Random post on the fediverse said Google was a huge investor in Gitlab already

Let's switch to self-hosted Gogs on Azure cloud instead.

s/Gogs/Gitea/

Kallithea?

Whatever.

Let's do our own distributed code thing based on XMPP.

kallithea is ugly

And call it... WAVE

Ge0rG: PubSub! All the things!

why the heck do code web view things think that the most interesting thing is the commit history?

even years after github figured out that this is /not/ the case

jonasw: the commit history is the whole pride of the developer!

jonasw: I think it depends who's viewing, actually.

But defaulting to code seems sensible to me.

I’ve only a few times seen myself to check the commit history of a project on GitHub. And tohse times it wasn’t useful because I couldn’t skip to the point where I wanted to look. But that might just be me.

I'd say the README is more important

README and how old the code is

github does it right imo

I think github does it right for github, yes.

But for our internal tools I look at commit histories of the repo more often than I look at the code through the web interface, I think.

Maybe I'm wrong about my habits.

maybe you can bookmark the /commits path then ;)

you’re not wrong about your habits :)

it may be useful for internal (but even in our internal gitlab I mostly look at files, not commit history; I typically have a clone already when I need commit history and look localy then)

But you don't look at the local copy for files? :)

Anyway, I think the github model is right for github at least.

Kev, most of the time I need to link something to someone

Ah.

Yes, I use that for that :)

or go for a quick reference in code which I don’t have cloned

> Ge0rG> Let's do our own distributed code thing based on XMPP. You might be joking, but sàt actually has an issue tracker already

They also do PRs right?

pep.: I'm only half-joking.

vanitasvitae, I think so yes

goffi ^

pep.: I'm well aware that the tech can be used for it. Unfortunately, we lack a dedicated developer team and something like 5M USD.

yep

Just like GitLab is talking about using ActivityPub for the federated thing and not xmpp

buy microsoft shares

Like... you know... we lack for IM over XMPP

Ge0rG, that'd be good to have indeed

pep. yes ActivityPub is taking over a lot of platforms

what I think is missing is that XMPP is not "showing" things

showing?

You mean marketing?

it's good we have Pubsub for 10 years, do you see any serious projects that is using it at the moment ?

no, not marketing, just build stuff on it

and also integrate it in existing projects

I know of very serious projects built on pubsub, yes.

Kev, do you have examples?

public examples

No, not that are for me to share.

k

Well that's not really helping the case

this for example https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0070.html, it's a really nice XEP, let's integrate XMPP auth in Gitlab, Wikipedia…

edhelas, sure, go go send PRs

pep.: Ge0rG: I'm indeed working on forge tools, mainly for our own needs, but with some helping hand it could become nice ==> https://www.goffi.org/b/9555cc02-6a87-4b6b-af85-20f1c0736722

edhelas: are you kidding ? I'm pushing for years for XEP-0070 and other stuff, and some people have followed (Chteufleur wrote his component after talking about XEP-0070 on DLFP, jnanar followed moment after with a demo website), but not enough. And yes ActivityPub is taking over where XMPP should have been.

years before Jehan also wrote a Wordpress plugin to use XEP-0070, but once again nobody followed

and that's the same story for nearly every feature of XMPP

goffi that's what I said, there is some nice little projects, but it's hard to get traction

XMPP adoption is not a problem that can be solved just by writing more code

MattJ: it's a combination of code, communication and luck

And concentrated power of will

MattJ: and something like XEP-0070 is super easy to integrate everywhere with Chteufleur component, and that's a good way to popularise XMPP IMHO.

goffi: +9999

daniel, I'm trying hard

There is a popular video showing comments post on Peertube and appearing in Mastodon, and everybody is amazed. That's something we do for many years between Movim and SàT (and Jappix when it was still in the game). It's a pitty to see that, but we have missed a great occasion, and now we'll have to deal with activityPub.

technology!!

Marketing marketing marketing

goffi, well, Prosody has had a Pubsubhubbub bridge for a long long time, so there's no strict reason that the two protocols can't co-exist

MattJ: ActivityPub is completely different tho

MattJ: sure they can co-exist, but we have to do gateways, it's time to develop, energy to maintain, and machine resources to do the protocol conversion

note that ActivityPub is dead simple, it's specially formatted JSON and signed http messages

With an actor model and inboxes and whatnot.

well XMPP is specially formatted XML

inbox is just an endpoint that receives JSONs, "actor model" is another JSON with your name

OStatus is Atom feeds

Plain simple Atom feeds. Throw in some extra metadata. Be happy.

pff atom feeds, why all these brackets, twtxt is plain text files! https://rosaelefanten.org/twtxt.txt

;)

doesn't OStatus use PubSubHubbub?

Yes

soo... it would be "easy" to roll an OStatus endpoint using Prosody sprinkled with some community modules?

Wiktor: Yes. I had federation with GNU Social working a long time ago.

Salmon is where it gets complicated.

I'm assuming that "signed http messages" is on the same level.

well actually activitypub has two levels of signing, signed http requests are mandatory by Mastodon, they are quite easy but there is another thing, signed JSON messages, that is... mess... converting JSON into RDF and ordering that (canonicalization) and then signing, fortunately it's not required now

it's funny, all these protocols are just juggling with how to pass the same basic data, and struggling with some basic security (does message X come from Y)

You've convinced me. I won't be looking at ActivityPub anymore. Thanks for sparing me that madness.

Wiktor: The funny thing is that XMPP (or even email) has all those problems solved since literally forever.

But can you run it on a shared web host?

Oh wait, you can it seems

And the authentication part of PubSubHubbub is basically Dialback over HTTP

MattJ: "it"

I know Zash, I've been reading XMPP RFCs and XEPs since 15 years ago or so, but since then I'm more reserved

they could at least reuse the xmpp s2s idea of client certs, that's simpler than these crypto-security-dialbacks (also present in ActivityPub)

Zash: The implementation OStatus was born from had the explicit goal of being in PHP and not requiring long lived processes

Which meant no XMPP, except then it did

MattJ: Ah. But it doesn't even require that. You can make do with a static atom XML file. ✏

Oh PubsubHubHub has been renamed, didn't knew that

WebSub

Good