@n0btc Matrix is good for collaboration, but I prefer XMPP for instant messaging. There's just something about the latter that feels faster on the client side.
@n0btc I'm a #Jabber / #XMPP user. Daily users for the last 3 years. #Conversations on #Android and #Dino on Linux. I run a server for friends and family, it's super reliable. Only problem I had in those 3 years was Let's Encrypt related. The server never needed any attention whatsoever.
@n0btc I tend to just use Telegram, it's not ideal but it's easy to get to grips with and it's vastly more widely used than Matrix or XMPP while still being FOSS
@xj9@am@fenix@mewmew@n0btc The protocol is part of the problem, but most of the problem is that people in the FOSS space tend to huff glue when it comes to UX (hardly a FOSS-unique problem, but it is very prevalent there)
@mewmew@cadence@allison i could just go write xmpp specs for decentralized chat and what else uuuh. a reply-to field for arborchat/zulip threaded comments and an edit message spec. (though to be fair there exists the last one, but it recommends only allowing edits to the very last message, but also says people might ignore this down the line.)
that would probably take less time than matrix to stop sucking.
@luna@allison@cadence > Jabber generates a lot more traffic than it necessarily should and will not perform well when users have many friends or enter huge chatrooms.
probably not a consideration of people who wrote XMPP, given, well, XMPP
@mewmew As a user of both XMPP and Matrix (multiple servers and clients for each), it is apparent that for similar post volume, XMPP is more performant. I don't know why Matrix people feel they have to hate XMPP. Their main competition is Discord, not XMPP, and they're losing badly.
Matrix would do better if they built an XMPP bridge into the server, so that each Matrix room was also available as an XMPP MUC, because the energy spent on trashing the other open protocol could be spent catching up to Discord, Mattermost, etc.
@dielan@allison@cadence@mewmew this is a hopelessly naive understanding of what software transforms people into and enables them to relate to others as well as facilitates as an environment to exist within
@mewmew@cadence@am Yeah. I find myself caring less about being compatible with mastodon considering the devs didn't care about being compatible with GNUSocial when they added scopes and other things. Pleroma followed mastodon in this. They've bent over backwards to be compatible and left GNUSocial behind. So, yeah... good job.
@fenix@allison@mewmew@n0btc it stored chats as emails and worked on all platforms and was interoperable, lightweight, to the point. The only chat logs I have left are bc of that “fall back to imap” strategy. Many good decisions.
@allison@n0btc It does not gate which protocols you can use. It gates battery usage and does not allow keeping TCP connections open while the app is not running.
@r@allison@n0btc Yeah, user choice is definitely a problem. Users having choice to use something other than you do needs to be put under the death penalty. 🙄
@js@n0btc >does not allow keeping TCP connections open i.e. it gates protocol usage and user freedom full stop I don't care what the rationalizations are, but a phone which doesn't even let me put MP3s on it properly without a sync application is of little more use to me than a paperweight.
@js@n0btc "life harder" my experience has been just the opposite. I use Linux and Android because they work and they're the easiest solutions for me, full stop.
@mewmew@allison@n0btc Yep. Mobile OSes suck. All of them. It’s about picking the one that sucks less. And there’s not really much of a difference as they all suck.
@js@mewmew@n0btc I'll pick the one that lets me run newpipe, conversations and husky. Everything else, even the browser, is window dressing compared to those three apps
@allison@n0btc How the entire UI is inconsistent, how random crap can decide to drain my battery within 2h (hello, Google Maps that was running in the background albeit not being used), the lag in the UI, the inconsistent frame pacing in the UI, the way too broad permissions for apps (so many that cannot be disabled at all, others that are only a binary on or off), the fragmentation of the entire ecosystem, the lack of updates for more than 2 or 3 years even on Google phones, etc. I could go on
@js@mewmew@n0btc You're also a literal rockefeller by my standards so you can afford paying for all that. I can't. Setting aside my new laptop ($550 a month ago), the newest pieces of gear I personally own are (in reverse chronological order) my LG V20, my ThinkPad X200, my MacPro2,1, and then you get out to the woods with a lot of non x86 stuff. I have to maintain and repair all of that on NEET incomes for reasons I don't wish to get into here. Something like an iPhone is obscenely, unjustifiably expensive to me compared to the medicines I need to actually feel that life is worth living
@allison@mewmew@n0btc Old iPhones still get updates and can be obtained for reasonable prices :). $150 will get you an iPhone 7 128 GB in almost mint condition, which is still plenty fast and has plenty of storage. But this is no longer arguing about OSes from a technical perspective. There’s Android phones that easily cost more than iPhones, too.
X200 is a nice notebook for Coreboot, though. I still have mine for exactly that reason.
@js@mewmew@n0btc it's not just price (although that's definitely a part of it), it's the economy of the ecosystem and value for money. Can I replace batteries on iPhones? Have reasonable assurance they won't break? Will they run all my apps? Can I use 3.5mm headphones with them? Until all these questions are answered in the affirmative, the iPhone is little more than a toy to me.
@allison@mewmew@n0btc Battery can be changed (done that). Breaking them can easily be fixed yourself since cheap 3rd party replacement parts are easily available. Apps depends on what apps you need. Headphone jack: Starting iPhone 7 they come with an adapter cable, 6s still has a HPJ and is not much older. Most androids no longer have HPJ either.
@js@mewmew@n0btc Note the phone I cited in my previous post, V20 has it and many of the newer ones I consider have it too. (incidentally I'm fiercely loyal to the V20 as the last good phone for all the reasons I just cited)
@allison@mewmew@n0btc Such a phone would be completely out of the question for me due to lack of updates. As soon as a phone no longer gets updates, it’s more useless than a brick.
@js@allison@mewmew@n0btc hat is it about “updates” that you like so much? To me, there're a sign that the software didn't work properly the first time.
Apart from my browser (to keep up with Google changing the web standards) and youtube-dl (to keep up with Google changing how YouTube works), none of my software ever needs another update. In fact, I don't notice when I've forgotten to install them for months.
You'd discard an entire piece of hardware just because updates have stopped‽
@wizzwizz4@js@mewmew@n0btc It's an iron law of software that any sufficiently complex system is going to have vulnerabilities. Question is if you can deal with them or not (in my case, it's proven irrelevant but for others not so much)
@wizzwizz4@allison@mewmew@n0btc Because that’s the current state of mobile OS security. On both Android and iOS. There’s new exploits every few weeks. So the bad guys get to know about them this way and you are not patched.
@allison@mewmew@n0btc@wizzwizz4 I think this is a real problem if we talk about price. Security is something only the wealthy can afford, because they can buy a new device when it goes EOL. This is a huge problem IMO. You must not limit security to wealthy people.
@js@allison@mewmew@n0btc My phone's DOS-based OS's SMS code doesn't have malformed-Unicode bugs, and the web browser is run in a lower privileged context. Apart from the USB stack and the *#nn# codes, I don't think there's any vector for a vulnerability.
@wizzwizz4@allison@mewmew@n0btc Those are even more insecure than any modern smartphones, as they usually don’t have a separate baseband and application processor. And the baseband softwares are all Swiss cheese. Worse than web browsers.
@js@allison@mewmew@n0btc But the processor's free from speculative execution, so you can prove the code correct.
(Thanks for letting me know about baseband issues, though. I'll look into trying to exploit mine when I next have time; there's some stuff I want to do with the hardware.)
@allison@mewmew@js@ebihara just my 2 cents. I hate IOS it feels like it is telling me what i am and am not allowed to do with a device i paid for. Havent owned an iphone since the 3GS. Even then i wouldnt upgrade until i could untethered jailbreak it. I went to android when 4.2 came out and magnification was added to the OS and have never looked back. I run pixel phones with custom roms that remove all hoogle services and i enjoy it. I get my updates and my phone works with the FOSS software i load from fdroid
@js@allison@mewmew@n0btc This highlights an important difference. The community is able to keep an old Android phone up to date years after the manufacturer abandons it. I'm not aware of anything like that for the Apple devices.
@brad@allison@mewmew@n0btc The community is able to provide newer userland on the same old kernel. Security bugs in drivers are still not fixed. So far, every iPhone got updates for so many years that it basically fell apart before it no longer got updates. An iPhone that gets updates for 7 years is nothing unusual.
@n0btc@allison@mewmew@ebihara iPhones have gotten a lot better since and allow way more then back then. iOS 4 and iOS 14 is really no comparison at all. If you compare to iOS 4, that’s of courses a very clear outcome. This was years before Apple opened things up a little.
@js@allison@mewmew@n0btc There are Android phones with mainline kernel support. The OnePlus 3 is one example. The postmarketOS project often works on mainlining devices.
@brad@allison@mewmew@n0btc There’s still plenty of blobs, starting from TrustZone all the way to the GPU. And those don’t get security fixes after EOL.
@js@brad@allison@mewmew fair. I had an ipad on IOS9 for a minute and still hated it. A friend gave me their old iphone 6s when they upgraded. Even on 14 i like android better
@mewmew@n0btc I probably will sometime x3 I'm confused with how to run it on the same subdomain as this through nginx, or on a seperate duckdns subdomain. Idk my config is pretty hacky as it is
@mewmew@n0btc see I've never done stuff of this scale before, just getting XMPP working was a big enough feat for me, and I've still been meaning to switch my database for it over to postgres but putting it off because right now it's working just fine. This is also my first real experiment with Nginx, every other "server" i had growing up ran Apache but everyone is showing me how much better Nginx is for some things and I'm just like *pikachuface*
@brad Sadly theres stuff that needs updates other than the kernel
I've not heard of any community attempts to take on maintaining drivers for an android device (it would be a whole load of work)
Theres also the component (WiFi, display, Bluetooth etc. etc.) firmware updates which, for valid security reasons, have to be signed by the device vendor. Monthly security update bulletins provide an ever growing public list of vulnerabilities in these firmwares
Are you sure, it allows only to edit the last message, or is this only the implementation in popular clients? afaik it allows to edit any message that has a unique id.
@allo > While it is possible to use this protocol to correct messages older than the most recent received from a full JID, such use is out of scope for this document and support for this SHOULD NOT be assumed without further negotiation. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0308.html
@icedquinn This may change in the final version of the XEP. And in the meantime I saw clients with a retraction function (it's another XEP), which is also interesting. On the other hand I noticed that people are surprised that you're able to read the original message. The edit function may be misleading when it comes to security.
@am@allison@fenix@n0btc@mewmew yeah and it's developing rapidly especially in the last time when Matrix moved into the game... I think it would be far more easy to solve the problems XMPP has than make something usable and comparable fast, easy to scale etc out of Matrix
@js@allison@n0btc I think there's an app overkill on android, there's also a slightly higher potential for viral infection, but this can be offset by running a security focused rom. clearly iPhone is more usable as of a long time ago, but basic things are confusing and convoluted in their recent UX decisions, and android has caught up since 6/7 and now we're at version 10. The security benefits of running a custom rom heavily outweigh the benefits of a "seamless experience" for me and prove more secure than iOS. May I ask, was your phone Samsung or some other big producer? Those phones tend to have very broken experiences.. Was it as much as your iphone? I had the nexus 6p and it was the best phone I've ever touched, that was half the iphone at the time and had a much better camera than iphone does (the colors were much more realistic than on the iphone, much more true to life, and it had a slightly higher sharpness to fully-focused images plus the AI whatever they used to keep the camera in focus worked while I used it)
@allison@jr@am@fenix@mewmew@n0btc bad and worse are bad and worse, but i use the bad things all the times, like i ate bad mcdonald dinner today and smoked bad cigarette and called my bad grandpa >:~0
ex: maybe matrix is slow bloat etc, i have cheap computer, i still don't a slow bloat .problem?
@wish@am@fenix@jr@mewmew@n0btc Will be 22 in a hot minute. IRC was the first chat program I ever used and in all likelihood it will be the last as well~
@lnxw37a2@allison@mewmew@luna@cadence IIRC at the very start they had a FAQ why do we need a new protocol and can't just use an existing one, and they argued that XMPP's architecture causes some unfixable issues. So in a way, XMPP being bad justifies Matrix's existence. If they didn't hate on XMPP, they'd have to admit the whole new protocol is a wasted effort.
@wolf480pl@lnxw37a2@allison@luna@cadence well, XMPP does suck enough to justify Matrix's existence though. evidenced by everyone building on Matrix and not XMPP
@mewmew@allison@luna@cadence@lnxw37a2 you mean "everyone who builds on Matrix is evidence" or "everyone builds on Matrix, and nobody builds on XMPP, which is evidence" ?
Your other argument - convincing faimly, user-friendliness, etc - are more about the clients and top-level features, not really about the core protocol.
And you're right, XMPP's ecosystem with the mess of extension sucks. But that doesn't mean Matrix couldn't use XMPP core and build their extensions and clients on top, achieveing the same result without making the latency skyrocket
Even if this is an implementation issue, they wouldn't have it if they built on top of XMPP, because then they could just extend/fork ejabberd or Tigase or sth.
By choosing to develop their protocol from scratch, they opted in to that mountain of work that they have to do before they have a solid implementation.
@mewmew@allison@luna@cadence@lnxw37a2 Also, if Matrix's federation works the way I think it works, they have an unfixable DDoS amplification vector built into the protocol, which manifests in a non-malicious way whenever a small instance tries to join a big room.
I still don't see how this is even a problem given that it a. only effects things that are not Matrix homeservers b. is somewhat hard to pull off and c. doesn't even work well given the nature of backoff
But ok, if they have a reasonable back-off, it should be ok after they stop being full mesh.
Still, an idle TCP (or even websocket) connection from the subscriber to the publisher would be preferable to webhooks IMO. Or do they already do that?
@wolf480pl@allison@luna@cadence@lnxw37a2 that's been under consideration, you could probably ask in the spec room. I don't remember the reason for not doing that.
@mewmew@allison@luna@cadence@lnxw37a2 Ok, so they have a chance to end up with a decent, scalable protocol. And after a few trials and errors they'll probably have a performant and reliable implementation.
I think by that time MIX will be widely implemented, possibly with nice clients with Matrix/Discord-like UX.
Does that mean Matrix was wasted effort? Not necessarily. But I don't think Matrix is significantly better than XMPP overall. It wins in some areas, loses in others.
@am@mewmew@allison@icedquinn@jr@n0btc pleroma chat is pretty alright for what it is, but I prefer XMPP because of client availability. Pleroma chat doesn't work on obscure older smartphones and tablets desu
XMPP
Matrix
Telegram (hybrid foss/proprietary I know)
imo
BUT QUINN
wow, fax.
