XSF Discussion - 2021-01-13

would it be interesting to start to share statistics about our XMPP servers ?

like return the number of registered users, created chatrooms… this kind of things, it could help to have a bit more visibility and "map" the XMPP network

Welcome to https://the-federation.info/

edhelas, I recently added this post for the next newsletter issue: https://blabber.im/en/das-jahr-2020-im-rueckblick/ would be interesting to see more :)

Specifically https://the-federation.info/protocol/xmpp

MattJ, I fear our (jabberfr) humongous number of inactive users is preventing a fine analysis :(

Which hosts there aren't jabber.fr anyways? 🙂

Total users is total users, not total active users :)

yes, but it may make sense to purge users after like 10 years of inactivity ✏

(though I had an user last week who asked me for a password reset, who hadn’t connected in more than 5 years)

I've got a feeling that 53 nodes is wildly incorrect, as that doesn't count servers with closed registration/self-hosted stuff. The implementation is very interesting, though.

deuill, the whole thing is opt-in, so yeah, there are more than ~50 xmpp servers 🙂

😉 https://blog.prosody.im/2020-retrospective/#more-users-than-ever-before

Most of them probably never heard of the-federation.info, enabled the module and registered themselves

Yeah, those stats are incredible, and I agree with edhelas that sharing them is both interesting and helps drive optimism.

> Most of them probably never heard of the-federation.info, enabled the module and registered themselves Especially as it involves webserver fiddlery if your xmpp server doesn't serve http on 443.

Interestingly, I added my own single-user server there, but it seems to have dropped off. Maybe because the static hack I did, or bugs. Not sure.

> would it be interesting to start to share statistics about our XMPP servers ? That would be great, in my opinion.

Go forth, and bikeshed the format to use!

we should get a die with formats on each side

I’ve already implemented three of them, only https://modules.prosody.im/mod_nodeinfo2.html is still in use AIUI.

json, xml, toml, hl7, csv, x86 asm

asm is the best data storage format, change my mind!

one fair roll and no more bikeshedding

inb4 "00: roll twice and combine"

I just rolled XML in CSV.

what format does the-federation use?

benharri, the one from https://modules.prosody.im/mod_nodeinfo2.html

Some JSON one.

and how can ejabberd export that?

ahh

Zash is your Prosody Atom blog available on Pubsub ?

"eat your own food"

edhelas, it's my microblog node

Oh

no

Prosody blog

I wanna say pubsub.prosody.im but I'm not sure

nope nothing there

Zash https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub :)

I raise you https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pubsub_feeds.html

edhelas, noted. supposed to work but it don't for whatever reason. might look another day

:)

You can put a XMPP subscribe uri somewhere

Movim support those

I can do a lot of things

Like write a script that turns csv into doap

> I just rolled XML in CSV. still better than HL7

What if you want to participate in the federation, but don't want local authorities to know the user numbers? Asking for a friend.

return random();

Ge0rG, as you can see on https://modules.prosody.im/mod_nodeinfo2.html you can disable the user count.

ah thanks Link Mauve . Maybe a good thing

Small question, should I add nodeinfo2 support to Movim itself, as it is more a client for XMPP ?

dwd, where did the compliance badge project go? IIRC you were keeping track of it at some point.

Link Mauve, my browser history only seems to recall Ge0rGs https://op-co.de/tmp/xmpp-compliance-badges-2020/

IIRC dwd asked some designer people to do some too.

There was one on bitbucket by the Tedd. I think I have a local copy, can provide tomorrow

Link Mauve: Board asked, but it didn't manifest

is there a way to get nodeinfo2 for the-federation in ejabberd?

Zash, that page looks nice, but what about a Core IM, Advanced Core client, for instance?

Or “Core IM, Core Mobile, Core Core”. :D

benharri, maybe ask in the Ejabberd room?

+1

Link Mauve, I also wondered how that's supposed to work

That's where I got stuck with the compliancer

Link Mauve: needs two badges

That's ... weird tho?

I've given up after all the bike shedding

Feel free to suggest better badge formats

Ideally we’d have a single badge per client.

https://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/ TIL

> Ideally we’d have a single badge per client. Not sure. I could see clients going for the IM and the A/V compliance, for example. Or for a web client, those two and additionally web. And each would be relevant information. But on the other hand the badges that zash linked are kind of large and you wouldn't want to overload the whole page with them. Maybe instead of the badges just display "IM" "A/V" below the client, and put the string into a grey/green box for core/advanced compliance. That way one could display all information, while still not overloading the list ✏

> Ideally we’d have a single badge per client. Not sure. I could see clients going for the IM and the A/V compliance, for example. Or for a web client, those two and additionally web. And each would be relevant information. But on the other hand the badges that zash linked are kind of large and you wouldn't want to overload the whole page with them. Maybe instead of the badges just display "IM" "A/V" in a single line below the client, and put the string into a grey/green box for core/advanced compliance. That way one could display all information, while still not overloading the list ✏

Zash: is it just me or is does that doap generator not even spit out valid XML? It sticks some random floating namespace prefixes with no definition in for me. Not to mention that it doesn't have the RDF wrapper that I guess is needed since the examples in the protoXEP have it?

Also if it's correct about how licenses work even the protoxep doesn't have those right. This is absolutely an insane way to document anything, it's just not possible to actually get it right.

seems like all the other projects managed to get it right without problems ✏

Apparently not if this generator is to be believed. Our spec is so convoluted that they all just get it wrong in the same way.

Or they all just copied the same handful of things without understanding them and without knowing how to actually get any reasonable documentation on them.

SamWhited: I felt the same way at first, but it's not so bad when you get used to it.

That attitude is why we can't have nice things.

> Or they all just copied the same handful of things without understanding them and without knowing how to actually get any reasonable documentation on them. and the problem with this is????

SamWhited, Firefox doesn’t display xmlns declarations in its default XML view, try view source.

Copypaste from an existing project and tweak a bit.

That's what everyone says about JavaScript.

Link Mauve: I actually did try that, still no declaration

SamWhited, also for license information, what did I do wrong?

Link Mauve: if this generator is correct it's a namespace that refers to a license, not a link to the license file.

But I have no idea, and no idea how I'd find that out because this format is undocumented overengineered nonsense that we shouldn't be using.

It's infuriating to watch the XML community make the same stupid mistakes over and over again, this is exactly why no one actually uses XMPP anymore.

poezio’s license requires the copyright notice to be kept as is, so it will be different from other projects.

Great, so it's maybe a namespace maybe a link, but I still don't know how or where I'd actually figure out what the valid thing for me to put there is.

SamWhited: Nobody adopted the simple format I made up. This is your punishment! :P

I could have picked a project with a standardised license like GPL, but I used the one I’m most familiar with.

SamWhited, the DOAP specification says “The URI of an RDF description of the license the software is distributed under. E.g. a SPDX reference”.

This doesn’t seem undocumented to me.

I haven't found that, maybe link it from the protoXEP? But still, great, yet another thing I have to learn. Now I have to figure out what URI of an RDF description is and how SPDX works instead of it just being <license>https://myproject.example.com/license</license> or whatever thing we came up with that didn't involve four technologies just to figure out what the license was.

SamWhited, it is at http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#license

That links me to an unhelpful blob of XML, not to documentation

Also maybe it's just broken? That doesn't link me to anything to do with the license as far as I can tell

It also has no character encoding defined, I'm guessing it's UTF-8 but the detection is wrong so there's a bunch of random garbled text on there.

SamWhited, RDF is a specification description format, pretty similar to our XEP format except machine-readable.

That’s not just “an unhelpful blob of XML”, that is the specification of the format.

SamWhited, I'm somewhat suprised at your rand on DOAP. So I just wanted to mention: In my impression, this format is used kind of widely in the open source community. Projects seem to do fine with it. There were also XMPP projects that had DOAP files independent of and before Link Mauve started using it for XEPs. Saying that noone uses this stuff because it's too complicated doesn't work if it's actually somewhat widely used.

Great, so now I have to learn RDF in order to know what fields are in RDF.

It's really not that widely used, as far as I can tell from searching around. A tiny handful of projects use it.

seems a bit like "I can't write a hello world without first understanding electrical engineering", copy+paste one from another project, tweak it, forget about it for life

yeah, like util-linux, gstreamer, gtk, gnupg-tools…

Or we could just pick something sane that doesn't require copy/pasting and hoping it's right.

SamWhited, do you have a counter-proposal?

I don't like IP I think we should go with something encrypted by default, can we stop using IP ?

Sure, here's two and my attempt at copy/pasting that I'm not sure is right because I can't figure out what fields need to come from foaf or schema or doap or rdf or spdx or where some of that is documented: https://gist.github.com/SamWhited/5fb6e302fde5bbf1803ca33d8923aaad

or is it too late?

That's clearly a false equivalence. If the entire internet was based on DOAP, I would resign myself to using it even though it's garbage, but there's no reason we have to use this. No major thing we need to be compatible with. It's just not that widely used.

ehh, might have screwed up during the copy/paste and trying to make it sane XML where we could define all the fields in the XEP, still, you get the idea.

SamWhited, it seems pretty easy to go from one to the other, tbh.

It's not because one would be documented in the XEP, the other is documented in multiple places and I'm not even sure how you'd figure out what to use. Eg. one project was using foaf. How am I supposed to discover that or learn that I can use it? Should I use it? Is it recommended?

SamWhited, properties like http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#maintainer mention <rdfs:range rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person" />

This is how you’re supposed to discover which range of available values are possible.

Again, that's not helpful, that's a blob of XML not documentation.

What I really like about doap is automagic rendering of doap files in web browsers, just by adding some style xslt, et voilà

Link Mauve, re badges: I started a shiny new version with a multi-stage form, fewer hacks, and doap - which I'll try to finish off soon; I can put the old version back up tomorrow if needed

Nice!

I already have the generation-from-DOAP used here, but without the images: https://linkmauve.fr/software/clients.html

I’m not particularly in a hurry, this would be nice to have before it reaches xmpp.org.

consider me motivated 😉

Cool!