Comment by 🚀 devoid
Re: "I'm considering making an account on either Matrix, Delta…"
I heartily recommend XMPP
May 03 · 5 days ago
6 Later Comments ↓
- I self-host XMPP with Prosody. It is lightweight, few dependencies and works fine. Both Matrix and Delta Chat feel like NIH syndrome to me, and do not fix anything broken with XMPP but rather cause even more fragmentation. Matrix is heavily centralised towards matrix.org for some reason, which is bad for an allegedly federated protocol.
- I use XMPP primarily, and Matrix for some public channels.
- XMPP: Dino, Conversations. Matrix: Element web.
- XMPP: self-hosted. Matrix: please, anything other than matrix.org.
btw, if you have any questions about XMPP, my JID is xavi92@slcl.privatedns.org
let me also share my thoughts.
i have used xmpp always, almost since its creation.
it is a great community governed protocol. it has a core and extensions. extensions get submitted for review and voted upon.
then app or server authors implement them.
it is practically a universal communication protocol.
everyone can extend it for their custom needs, write a client that support an extension, then use any server to pass data in between two or mone clients.
i think http was a mistake. maybe gemini was too.
humans naturally need communication, not tvs or radios.
the server should not be superior in any way, just the proxy, data broker, that protects your activity.
it is possible that you have already used xmpp without knowing.
when the companies were setting up their chat services, very often they just used xmpp: many good open source servers already there, many good clients too.
twenty years ago i have worked in a european big company that had an ambition to be sort of european google, and their messaging was of course xmpp.
whatsapp just took xmpp, existing server implementation, replaced usernames with phone numbers, closed "federation" (decentralization), gathered everybody's addressbooks and that's it.
people were able to connect to whatsapp by using other xmpp clients and whatsapp was furious about not being able to forbid it.
google talk was xmpp. google had "don't be evil" slogan back then and the nerd culture was, if not dominant, but was around and alive back then in their offices.
i was naive enough to bring people to google, because i knew: i will be able to chat with them without having a google account.
i still have screenshots of my openmoko phone with pidgin and many gtalk contacts.
i was able to use the xmpp feature, to see which devices the google person was connected from: phone, browser, and i was able to send them message to the device i wanted to. that is an xmpp feature that some clients support, and my gtalk contacts were surprised i can send messages by choosing where to send.
now i understand they haven't even noticed, or have forgotten i wasn't talking to them by not using a google account, but my own server account.
when two major russian companies (i don't even want to mention their names to not advertise in any way) opened their chat services, they again used what? xmpp. because you don't need to invest much in r&d, it is there, mature protocol, good servers, just install and use.
those both companies also took an open source well known client and replaced the name and logo.
of course being capitalistic pigs they have forbidden the federation.
it was possible to send email from one of those services to the other, but not chat messages.
internet would be a much better place if xmpp took over several years earlier, and internet users would have get used to the idea, that as well as email, there is no reason why chats should not be federated and decentralized.
so, of course you see i love xmpp.
i have tried matrix.
matrix protocol is developed and controlled by the company.
i long ago gave up hopes any company may do something good for us.
basically there's only one server implementation from them, and one client.
two of my friends tried to selfhost matrix. both gave up. it is designed in a way one must have lots of resources to store lots of irrelevant for their server data.
so i consider it less "democratic" in many ways.
that one client from them might have more expectble by contemporary user ui/ux, but i don't care.
for me one company that controls the protocol is too much power in one hands. and not being rich enough to run a matrix server is another showtopper.
i run an xmpp server on a raspberry pi 1, the 32bit version with 256m of ram.
it's not possible with memory and space hungry matrix.
on deltacht: initially if i understand correctly, it is a chat like client for email.
well, okay. nothing against it. many different servers can be used then. one can install postfix or sendmail or opensmtpd.
just like for xmpp one may choose to run servers written in different languages.
but never used deltachat. maybe i will one day.
what do i use for xmpp?
well for android phone i suggest to get an app called 'conversations'. on fdroid it is not paid, but you can support devs by buying the app on play.
for desktop: there's dino, well, what contemporary user expects from such a program. and gajim is feature rich. both aren't my favourite, but i think for a novice or generic user those are fine.
there's unofficial dino build for windows as well, recentry updated, tell me if you need it, i know where is it on the internet.
for macos beagle works fine.
one can use movim in the browser and can save it as progressive web app.
on account providers:
it is interesting that recently some xmpp chats just ban big provider domains. also ban domains known for public registration.
when you have an account on a small server, that means you are more trustworthy. someone knew you and opened an account.
if you're coming from a public big server, you may spam or misbehave.
so i don't know what to suggest.
there are lists of xmpp servers with open registration. or conversations has their own domain: conversations.im but be aware some mucs (multi user chats) you won't be able to join because of that.
one more thing that was well designed: prevention of man in the middle attack.
i have heard a story of someone's grandmother: she would take the landline phone and talk to friends of her daughter presenting herself as the daughter. their voices were sounding similar and friends would not know.
how do we know we talk to someone? well they are authorized to the server.
but nowadays we do e2ee, so we also encrypt for them. so we need their public key to encrypt for them.
with contemporary clients like dino and conversations you can share your public key and account via qr code.
or you can read someone's qr code with a camera.
or you can verify it manually and set as trusted.
then if someone else figures out password of your contact and writes to you, your client will indicate it.
if they use e2ee, your 'conversations' app with default configuration will accept it, but warn you: 'blindly trusted new public key from...' - so you know your contact is connected from a new device.
the incoming encrypted messages will be marked with a closed lock, not shield.
some paranoids forbid blindly trusting keys and manually review always.
👻 darkghost · May 04 at 15:09:
I would agree that XMPP is the superior protocol here because it is fully open. It is to instant messaging what email is to electronic mail. It's a protocol not a platform. I remember using prodigy mail back in the day before they were on the internet and you could send messages to anybody using prodigy mail. It was platform vs protocol.
I use XMPP and Matrix. They both work fine. If you want to join, the first thing I'd ask is what your friends use, because you should use that one. Second, if you're self-hosting, XMPP demands much less (and lets you handle video separately, when you're ready).
I currently host a Matrix homeserver (and an IRC server, but that's a bit out of scope). I haven't used Delta Chat or XMPP, but I've liked Matrix so far. It's a bit quirky at times - sometimes interactions take a long time to process - but the protocol works relatively well with the Cinny client.
I also like that Matrix is federated, so I can host my own homeserver for low latency with other local users in my community while still being able to visit other popular spaces with users outside of my server.
Original Post
I'm considering making an account on either Matrix, Delta Chat, or an XMPP server, and I'd like to get some opinions from my fellow Geminauts. Which do you use, and why? Have you used more than one of these services, and if so, how do they compare to each other? What programs and apps do you use to access them? What account providers do you recommend, or do you self-host?