@poVoq None of the messaging systems have anything technical that makes any of them more significant or useful than others. Some really annoy and piss me off, and I use them way less often. So, as the article said: it’s about who I can reach. I miss when Google and Facebook were XMPP, and I could use pidgin for pretty much everything. BTW: I’m [email protected].
Not quite true.
Different feature sets make some solutions more useful than others.
I like that I can set my profile pic to contacts only, that I do not have to share my ID in public chats, which helps a lot against spam, that I have a protocol that’s fast and efficient, that I can see the timezone of people I’m communicating with and that components can have commands. I like using IRC via XMPP, as I don’t need a separate bouncer.
Choosing something with the right feature set is more useful than choosing something else.
You’re not wrong, but people use Hot Flaming bags of dog shit all the time. Building up a large user base of people who use it isn’t the most important thing oh that’s the only thing
Australia has had phone number portability for well over 20 years. This means that for basically everyone, the phone number they had when they first got a mobile phone is the one they use today. Phone numbers are amazing in that they are simultaneously a stable code from which we can contact someone we know, but they are also abstract and therefore deniable (AKA “new phone who dis?”).
What we have today is not a network effect problem, but an identity problem. Not only does XMPP give you a pretty unreliable identity, that identity, well, identifies you to everyone. Everyone knows [email protected] is me, even people who aren’t logged in.
Signal gets around this by piggy backing off your phone number, a thing people trust. Basically any traction Signal has is because of this piggy-backing. It can also use this technique to prevent a bunch of spamming / aid in moderation. Matrix, which the article also mentions, also gets around a bunch of issues through centralisation. XMPP servers need to do this manually, have moderation, etc. You also cannot guarantee portability the way you can with phone numbers.
One possibility is to do the same trick. Piggy back off phone numbers. Create some sort of attestation framework with phone numbers, then have some list of servers which will automatically create a UUID-named account based on that attestation. Now servers can come and go, and the client just needs to create a new attestation. This sort of works like a sea of servers and the client just uses the nearest one to create an account and fetch attestation information. However, it also has one of the biggest downsides of Signal: Needing a phone number.
The other trick is to use some sort of externalised identity framework, maybe openid or Solid, which means someone has to pay for the Solid ID, but not for the actual messaging framework. I wonder if that just shifts the problem one step over though. The big disadvantage here is that the deniability / anonymity is completely gone.
The root of the problem feels like DNS, and XMPP anchors off it. Maybe the right solution is something peer to peer, but then why not just use that as the messaging platform.
On this topic deltachat has come up with a beautiful solution I believe. Your identity is your public key, and servers are used solely to relay stuff from one end to the other. You can have 10 “accounts” on 10 different servers, servers can fall and it’s still ok because there are 9 still up.
The con is that you don’t have a simple, publicly usable pointer to you like a mail address or a phone number. Turns out it’s the best defense against spam, creepy weirdos, trolls, so it’s not that problematic.
I had acquired a habit of typing a message, sending it, and only then reading it again and checking for typos. The lack of such an essential feature caused me to send incomprehensible messages, making the app almost unusable for me.
I’m sorry, what? This is the reason he starts with for saying Signal sucks? I can’t even bend my head around that logic.
Well, at least he backtracks at the end.
Signal doesn’t actually suck. It’s fine. It gets the job done. It lets me communicate with my friends. We are quick to dismiss a new thing after two minutes of trying it out just because it doesn’t meet our expectations. This is especially true if we are pressured into something instead of following intrinsic motivation. We obsess over the little things that ultimately don’t matter. However, if we earnestly give it a shot, we get used to it. We adapt.
This kind of silly reasons are exactly what people say why they can’t use xmpp and prefer Telegram for example.
Signal supports editing messages. I don’t get it.
When the author started using it didn’t support edits yet
Ah-ha, I see. Thanks!
I think Snikket is a great way of getting people in. Host a jabber hive through snikket with an address like metalhive.social, stanislavskiheads.space, windmillers.xyz or medleypool.com; then share links or qr codes to the target audience. and bing bang bong, everybody is in. Talk of it as if it’s obviously the easiest approach to messaging.
It’d be great if a major fedi platform added a sidecar xmpp server so everyone’s fedi handle was also a xmpp handle.
It’s easy enough to set up. I have that working here on slrpnk.net and also on an Akkoma instance I run.
Peertube instances also come with a built in xmpp server if you install the live chat extension, but there it is used in a more limited fashion.
To be honest, Gajim for Desktop and Monocles for android are an extremely accesible combination to present to new people.
I’m trying to move my friends away from corpo platforms but screensharing is proving to be a real bottleneck. AFAIK movim’s client is the only one that supports screensharing but needs a chromium browser to share audio, also I think thw client is overall really ugly and sluggish so I don’t recommend it a lot.
Movim is sluggish? I don’t have that experience at all, and it would be really confusing because it mostly runs on the server. Maybe you are using an instance on the other side of the world?
That could be it tbh. I kinda forgot I was dealing with a server on europe, but I haven’t really seen any trusworthy instances in south america and most countries here don’t have well developed privacy laws.
I think this Brazilian service wants to add Movim soon: https://isacloud.com.br/
The same applies to publishing content: if you send newsletters or updates via email and messaging apps, do it via XMPP as well
Maybe the xsf should read this and do it
They actually started publishing their newsletter as a Movim/Monocles compatible xmpp pubsub blog a few months ago.
Nice ! Feeds desperately need to be implemented more
Xmpp/conversations has little to sell. That is different than free to use. I mean there is no big daddy spending money to get traction to earn something back. And the bid daddies push people to use other network they can seize. That is the number 1 reason for me. Otherwise they would have helped improving xmpp in the open. Same problem as libreoffice and mastodon
