We can start it up again. Time to nudge in the next Lemmy AMA to allow XMPP addresses alongside Matrix. You’d be surprised how little things like that can nudge adoption & pique curiosity.
toastal
joined 4 years ago
It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).
XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications -- while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.
"reputable"
Projects like this should be self-hosted & encourage contributors to set up their own self-hosted mirrors to make sure the code is both distributed & decentralized which users/makers have full control over their platform.
So is WhatsApp, Zoom, Jitsi
Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.
Syncing for 15 minutes
Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.
The comment implies Signal is peak chat when it’s flawed & other than maybe onboarding, isn’t superior to alternatives—with the phone number being a pro for onboarding is a con for privacy. It still requires you have an Android or iOS primary device (fueling that duopoly). They don’t want you installing it from a safer space like F-Droid. They still by default send notification metadata to Google & Apple (websocket support exists but drains a fair amount of battery & they refuse to support UnifiedPush). They still ship/use Apple emoji on Android & Linux. It’s still a centralized system you can’t self-host. They still have that missing part of the source code (where I would assume the feds planted something). It still isn’t a good space large chats. And the Electron desktop apps are far too bloated.
XMPP & Gateways
There are several independent options for all of those that, while they suck to go to a different site, often do a much better job than the code forge—think how Gerrit makes PRs look foolish, Bugzilla, Trac, Trello, etc. even the humble mailing list. What’s also important to note is a separate servdce offers different (or even better) organization options. Say you wanted a “polyrepo”… well, new you need a separate issues/review for every repository which often doesn’t fit as concerns can apply to mulitple repos (which now that I think about it might be one of those pressures on folks to create monorepos due to tooling lock-in choices from certain forges). That’s not to say there isn’t a cost/benefit to losing the integration of a central spot or less servers to deploy, but it very well could mean that a small orchestra of independent services could better suit a project compared to opting into every feature a code forge is offering.
That is to say, the one feature you see in all code forges—even the simple ones like cgit—is the ability to browse code/commits.
Signal still requires a SIM card & an Android or iOS primary device. Usernames here just let you cloak your phone number, not keep it a secret from the service.