XSF Discussion - 2021-02-03

jonas’> and for the record, I know of at least one implementation which does not guarantee the order and which would with that change become non-compliant care to reveal the name of the implementation?

Zash, why do you think the non-SRV fallback was a mistake?

If it works without it, why bother?

And that's how you get things ignoring it.

Given that even today many devices, incl routers, prevent SRV lookups, it appears to be a nice mechanism to achieve connectivity, even in hostile environments

So it is again a trade-off

So we should only use TLS on 443 for everything ever?

Not sure if I follow

it is a trade off, because maybe without the non-SRV fallback XMPPs reputation would be worse, cause "it often does not connect for some reason"

Does anyone have a client recommendation that actually works for Windows? Got a friend asking and, sadly, I have no idea what to tell them

and I think I would always strive to increase the chances the client is able to connect, whereas server operators are often able to forwards the fallback port to the right machine (what yax.im potentially does)

Also what free servers are available these days that aren't constantly offline? I never know what to recommend to people who aren't super tech savvy

SamWhited, Gajim and jabber.fr

This person doesn't speak french so I probably shouldn't point them at that one

why?

Sorry, should have said, as far as I know they only speak english

Because the whole web page is in french and they probably want to be able to setup an account :)

there is no french speaking needed to register at that server

you can register from within gajim

the account creation wizard will lead him through the process, he just has to type jabber.fr into the filed

I don't think that's going to be most peoples first instinct. If I say "you can get an account at this server" they're probably going to try and find tutorials or try to visit the site

flow, I came to that conclusion at some point and I don't have the reasoning in my head atm. Something about optional things being bad and unreliable.

i thought its your friend

hm there are a number of other servers

lovetox: they are, but they are non technical and I'm having a hard enough time convincing them to use XMPP at all without being like "Oh, and setup will be too complicated so I'll have to walk you through every step". I want fewer things to scare them off, and visiting the site and not being able to read it probably won't give them a good first impression :)

We’d like to eventually translate the website, but the PHP horror that it currently is doesn’t let us do that easily yet.

i think on the C site the compliance tester has a lot of servers

Yah, I'm looking at the status page right now, not sure which ones are actually good to recommend though. Ever since jabber.at shut down I haven't had one that I know and trust to be solid and reliable

But also, yes IBR is open, but our status outages are in french, as is the support room (even though we of course can answer english inquiries), so that should not be a top pick

Yah, don't get me wrong, I've heard good things about jabber.fr and would probably recommend it to people if I knew they spoke french, I just don't want that to be a barrier for this person :)

I don’t really know the public english servers

404.city exists, I don’t know what it amounts to, but it seems maintained

Maybe conversations.im, if they’re fine with paying every year.

But SamWhited i dont get how its more work for you to tell someone to go to a webpage and register, then just telling them, put this URL into the Gajim signup filed

The price of having an English website. :)

It's not more work for me, but if they try to find tutorials or visit the site it's just one more "scary" thing for them to have to deal with. I'm trying to minimize the pain, and that means a site that has support and what not in a language they understand.

SamWhited, there is https://status.conversations.im/

mathieui: that's what I'm looking through :)

oh sorry, https://status.conversations.im/historical/

I just don't know which ones are actually good

but not updated anymore

Thanks; went with Gajim and yax.im, which I forgot was public but which I know Ge0rG keeps up and running. Hopefully they'll be able to register without too much trouble.

mathieui, fwiw, 404.city has mod_block_strangers loaded

Oh well

lovetox, SamWhited: At Kaidan we have defined soft categories whether a server should be suitable to recommend or not. E.g. website language. I think this is important from the point when one need support

I vaguely remembered 404.city arguing they should be part of some list and people saying their uptime was bad, or they did something else bad (maybe mod_block_strangers) and I couldn't remember what it was so I didn't consider them, but considering I don't even remember the details maybe that was a bad assumption (and apologies to the owner if they're here and I'm just misremembering that there was something bad about the service)

emus: oh cool, I'd be curious to see those if you have them listed somewhere

I never know what to recommend to people, so that would be helpful.

It used to be a simple JSON at https://invent.kde.org/network/kaidan/-/blob/master/data/servers.json

Currently, a draft for a more complex JSON is worked on at https://invent.kde.org/melvo/xmpp-providers

^

I'm still hesitant about clients, just quickly doing a search for "best windows XMPP client" I see why they were concerned. Everything looks like early 2000's or 90's UIs, most of these I didn't know still existed or are like Pidgin and haven't been updated in *years*, etc.

But whenever I open that tab and I see the four-levels-deep-nested-JSON I just close the tab.

SamWhited, gajim 1.3.0 looks quite good imo (but not final release yet)

I recommended Gajim like people said because it's not terrible on Linux, so hopefully it looks okay on Windows and doesn't have the same old "GTK looks bad" problems everyting used to have

SamWhited: good news! Pidgin was recently upgraded to CVE-2017-5589

Ge0rG, that json is wrong! jabber.fr is online since 2003, not 2012!

SamWhited: current gajim nightlies work decently on windows. *And* there is a Bruno theme!

SamWhited, we are currently reworking the GUI in Gajim to look more like todays messengers

Although I admit, I'm hesitant because even on Linux Gajim still shows me python stack dumps on occasion, and I wouldn't want non-tech people to ever see the "Programming Error" pop up

mathieui: make a PR

but we still need 4-6 months

yah, hopefully it will work well enough for them and they'll be impressed as updates come out

SamWhited, about error popups

so you would say the application should just not work on an error

and show nothing?

lovetox: I don't know what it should show, but definitely not a giant stack dump, that's just scary :)

its not giant, its a little popup with a message what happend and what the next steps are that the user can take

but yeah when i think about other software

i never see errors

i think they just op to silently fail

or they are perfect and never have errors :D

Most things probably show a "Something went wrong, do you want to report this?" I think

With maybe an advanced view where you can see the error if you're the type who can do something about it.

of course we could hide the data and only show it on advanced

but it was important to me that the user sees exactly the data which get reported

otherwise im confronted with allegations that Gajim phones home or something

I think errors fall into a couple of categories: things that the user can do something about (eg. "this search was invalid, please don't use special characters") which generally shouldn't interrupt the workflow and should tell the user how to fix it

Things the user can't do anything about but need to know about and are just informational ("this server is offline, please wait a bit and try again")

And things the user can't do anything about but someone else can (eg. "this thing crashed, our bad, here's a link to send us a report and you can expand the advanced view to see the stack dump if you want")

Maybe also "things which really can just silently fail because they're not errors and we expect them to fail sometimes". I don't have an example of that, I imagine it's rare, but it might exist.

Anyways, I don't know how to best handle them, but eg. Slack never shows me a scary stack dump, but also it doesn't seem like things silently just don't work

jcbrand: in converse.js does it not pick the same name you're already using in a chat by default? Same friend also found that and logged in with it because he didn't want to install anything on his work laptop, but is asking why it's making his name "<username>2" or something instead of just being the same as Gajim

sorry, wrong room, meant to take that to the converse room and just went back to the one I was just asking in out of habbit

SamWhited: I've responded in the Converse MUC

Thanks; sorry for the room mixup.

(looks like a bug in Converse, FYI; the author says it should use the existing username)

*facepalm* why does my recent chat thing keep defaulting to this room?

Sorry again.

:D