XMPP & Matrix

[NoDigit]

Does anyone here use XMPP or Matrix for anything? I checked them out recently and both seem to work fine. What are your favourite clients? Will they ever see greater adoption? What do you think is the main hurdle?

 

[NoDigit]

Lemmy and Mastadon are seeing greater adoption recently. I'm hoping federated, open protocols will see more uses in the future. Torrent is a great example of what can be achieved.

 

[rdn]

For matrix the only usable clients i know of are element.io and cinny
xmpp is too old for me to really care about it

for any tool to get widespread adoption, you need centralization.

 

[MilkDrinker]

I've been wanting to use xmpp for a while. I'd use Dino as a client. The problem is finding people to chat with. People I know in person wouldn't care about all that "fringe hacker tech"

 

[NoDigit]

For matrix the only usable clients i know of are element.io and cinny
xmpp is too old for me to really care about it

for any tool to get widespread adoption, you need centralization.

That's a common thing to say, but I think decentralised and distributed protocols can also be popular. E.g. torrent or email. The main issue, I think, is that it's harder to make money from those, so there's fewer people motivated to make quality products. E.g. there's no good UX clients.

 

[NoDigit]

Ok, I finally found use for Matrix! Different communities on Lemmy seem to use it as the default chatroom, instead of Discord.

 

[127yiuha]

I've been using xmpp and hosting an ejabberd server for many years now. xmpp is absolutely perfect for any messenging needs. it is federated and you dont rely on a single entity that can censor or ban you. Accounts get banned everywhere, whether its discord, youtube, facebook - you name it.

for any tool to get widespread adoption, you need centralization.

this statement is not true. you can create an xmpp account on any server and communicate with any account hosted on another server. whatsapp btw is based on xmpp as well. the creators just changed the protocol so that they can build a walled garden for their users, as do all companies because they want to keep control and earn money off their users.

people need to realize that they have to take responsibility for their communication, information and financial needs and dont trust any company out there especially not those that offer "free" or "almost free" services.

 

[tristan9]

distributed protocols can also be popular. E.g. torrent or email

Not sure they're good examples tbh.

Torrents

Most of the torrent ecosystem still relies on a few big trackers and indexes; few people actually go DHT-only. And the popularity of private trackers is even more so an example. Also, as soon as DDL/Streaming became popular, they eclipsed the torrent scene, as far as normies as concerned.

Email

Email's benefit is that everyone keeps an archive of things. But as a tool, protocol, and UX-wise, it's unthinkably shit, really. We just happen to not have a much better alternative right now. But in practice people truly only use it as last-resort, because it always works ™️, not because it's any good.
And even then, a handful of companies (Google's Gmail/GSuite and Microsoft's O365) account for the vast majority of email traffic, with few people actually running a mail server (because it's ridiculously hard to do correctly).

The truth is that nothing fully decentralized will even gain traction, because of the operational effort which isn't fun nor worth it for most people. The best you can get is probably a ActivePub-like level of decentralisation, where people will end up signing up on a couple of large instances which peer with one another.

Well, until something like Threads comes up, and 90% of the public uses it as their home server. Whether it still is decentralized at that point is up to semantics. You'll argue that as long as the protocol allows it, it is. Until Threads (or whatever other biggest player) writes their own extensions or supports only part of the protocol. Just like Gmail did with IMAP in the past. Then it's decentralized-originally-but-defined-by-one-corp.

 

[BayuAH]

Ah, XMPP. Google Hangout used to have this API. I prefer use this, so I can use more lightweight client instead heavy web-browser page version.

 

[NoDigit]

I've been using xmpp and hosting an ejabberd server for many years now

A veteran! Haha. Which clients would you recommend? Is UX important to you? Can you get a non-technical person on that?

people need to realize that they have to take responsibility for their communication, information and financial needs and dont trust any company out there especially not those that offer "free" or "almost free" services

I feel like the tide is turning. More and more open ecosystems are popping up with actual users. The future is now, old man! 😁

Most of the torrent ecosystem still relies on a few big trackers and indexes; few people actually go DHT-only

I think that's fine - all the different trackers are independent and so resilient. Also, actually, the files that are shared tend to be the same.

The truth is that nothing fully decentralized will even gain traction, because of the operational effort which isn't fun nor worth it for most people

Now docker allows people to set things up with minimal effort. For larger things, I think, at some point k8s will finally get convenient to use. In principle, you can specify your k8s cluster with a bunch of files, set it up with kops and apply with kubectl. Clone a git, kops create and kubectl apply. That's 3 commands.