XSF Discussion - 2023-02-16

There used to be an analysis of xmpp server hosting locations, where 40%(?) of european servers ran at Hetzer. Does it still exist?

Note that the analysis was complete bullshit

But I can probably go dig it up if it's important

Not really, I just wanted to have a rough estimate of provider concentration. I can do a dump of my s2s connections and run them through whois easily enough.

I'm curious as to the reasons for a complete bullshit analysis on this subject being created and floating around.

Was this some kind of marketing thing by Hetzer?

It was a bad faith analysis to discredit XMPP. It was done by folks who on their website are extremely pro Signal. The server list was retrieved from the compliance tester (only the public list for people who opted in to make the server public) They checked the A records of the domains not actually connect to it. That's why conversations.im for example showed up as hetzner even though it's not hosted there

So it only tells you that the compliance tested is popular in Germany / Europe

Which doesn't tell you anything about XMPP

thanks

Ironically someone else did this on Mastodon. (probably not bad faith) originally got similar results because their sample list was BS. Then they subsequently tried to get a better sample and then the results improved to were there was no Clear 'winner'

Obviously big cheap providers are big and cheap. But there is also quite a few of them

https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/screenshot-20230216-1676542978-7374.png

XMPP servers on port 5269 (counts are IPs)

this looks veeeeeery biased

MattJ: is that from shodan?

Yes

Which doesn't tell you a lot about the public xmpp network ✏

Yes, it's not about public XMPP servers

The spike is Dreamhost's shared hosting service, which has been around a long time and include(s|d) XMPP

bad faith or not, hetzner is rather dominant.

maybe fetching the first line of `desc:` from whois was not such a good idea. I've ssen two personal names of regulars from this room scrolling by already ;)

of 882 servers in my s2s, 139 run at hetzner.

and 38 run at "Transferred to the RIPE region on 2018-06-27T02"

OVH clocks in with 10

Transferred-to looks like another Hetzner ASN

so counted together, hetzner is >20% of xmpp servers that talk to yax.im

but https://xkcd.com/1138/

does not surpise me, their pricing is very competitive for dedicated hardware, VMs and Cloud

netcup is ~6%, and all the other big ones are below 2%, respectively

Jonas Schäfer is 0.6%

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

fwiw, I doubt that Openfire has such a bias towards Hetzner. Maybe I could do a heatmap of geolocated IPs from update checks, or somesuch. Results wouldn't be affected by federation, but by installation base. That in itself isn't any indicator of a server's popularity, so... yeah. Statistics.

The thing is, Hetzner is a popular hosting provider, that's all

It's not something about XMPP, it's something about where people mostly get their servers when they want to run stuff

Everything not on smaller providers like Hetzner is on larger providers like Amazon and... guess where Signal servers run

people that are on servers that connect to Ge0rG's server, that is.

agree with Matt, and they have some tutorials which makes it simple to get up a server and running using their services. Like: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/prosody-debian9 ✏

"debian9" got me triggered

If someone wants to get a real number for the public federated network they can subscribe to the firehose that is the certificate transparency logs and try to connect to each domain via s2s, for a 3 month period

Still a possibility to miss some where the domain is *.bob.com and the XMPP server is at aoeu.bob.com but you'd get most

ralphm, MattJ: I need to stay out due to sickness. sorry. but maybe one can review on my points. I also wrote my opinion on the topics

if we switch to have it in chat I still may can make it

No worries, thanks for letting us know. Get well soon!

thx

Ok tried to follow the board meeting though the Jitsi Android app, but the audio was distorted. I gave up.

😬

if folks would prefer we can of course use text chat instead…

Oh, I don't mind much. I only commented on my attempt here, in case some of the people in the call were wondering what I was doing, joining and leaving repeatedly.

moparisthebest, FTR, you wouldn't find any of my domains

hm, though, you would find some, (s.j.n is on 5222 I think), but not all

jonas’: because wildcard or?

FYI, there is now a XEP lifecycle diagram at https://xmpp.org/about/standards-process/#a-xeps-lifecycle. the diagram's code is editable using any mermaid editor. code can be found here: https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/commit/e544dbd071428941908fcbe30a1ea5d215fa4c56