Modern XMPP project discussion - 2025-07-24

How does one suggest to make Xmpp (forgive me) popular again? Email is federated but nowadays it seems people like their chats fairly unfederated and walled-garden-y.. I don't really see any improvement between ye olde hangouts and Google chat

russdacic: Let's start with waiting more than 5 minutes for an answer 😉 ✏

Google Chat is worse than Hangouts; they removed a lot of things that I liked including custom per-contact notifications

I wouldn't say people "like" their chats unfederated and walled-garden-y, but rather I think many people don't realise there is any alternative? If all you've seen is walled-garden chat platforms you'll think that's how chat necessarily works

> I wouldn't say people "like" their chats unfederated and walled-garden-y, but rather I think many people don't realise there is any alternative? If all you've seen is walled-garden chat platforms you'll think that's how chat necessarily works ☝️ ↺

> I wouldn't say people "like" their chats unfederated and walled-garden-y, but rather I think many people don't realise there is any alternative? If all you've seen is walled-garden chat platforms you'll think that's how chat necessarily works 💯 ↺

At best, someone who _knows_ the difference might prefer a centralized service because of the consistent featureset and UX...

But there's no reason you can't have that in a federated system. Projects like Snikket, Prāv, and Moxxy are trying to do just that.

> I wouldn't say people "like" their chats unfederated and walled-garden-y, but rather I think many people don't realise there is any alternative? If all you've seen is walled-garden chat platforms you'll think that's how chat necessarily works What surprised me is how people still do not understand the concept of XMPP if I say "it's just like E-Mail". As it turns out, most people just sign up on GMail or Hotmail because their parents did that too. There is no single thought going into which E-Mail service provider they choose. ↺

This is also why there's a lot of fuss about Hotmail/Outlook today. Microsoft as an E-Mail provider is undoubtedly unfit for purpose, but children signing up on Outlook do not realize that, but even business people do not realize it. It's insane. Maybe more people should blog about how much PITA Microsoft is for them.

Why would there be? We are taught in schools everywhere to use google and microsoft

A lot of states use microsoft too.

There is no reason for people to question it, or any education to do so

Correct. Even here in New Zealand all my kids school stuff is Microsoft. It's extremely frustrating.

I think even on the developer side a lot of education is focused on brand names these days rather than concepts. For example, "Digital Ocean" or "Cloudflare" instead of "VPS" or "DNS Server"

> I think even on the developer side a lot of education is focused on brand names these days rather than concepts. For example, "Digital Ocean" or "Cloudflare" instead of "VPS" or "DNS Server" 💯 ↺

Also the "people nowadays" show the context that person is thinking of btw. And that google chat is the same as hangouts. Its either nostalgia lenses of an imaginary past when people cared, or ageism that kids now are stupid. ✏

When one developer saw my email address with a custom domain (that I was selfhosting on a VPS) they noticed it didn't end with "@gmail.com" or similar and said "wow fancy, so you've set up Microsoft Outlook!"

No one ever cared except the nerds. Thr march of progress has just made it worse but for the same amount of ignorance.

I include myself in "nerds" btw.

What I got out of that is, they've learnt that "for a custom domain, you can subscribe to Microsoft Outlook" instead of "for a custom domain, you can selfhost your email or choose an email provider that supports custom domains" (of which Microsoft Outlook is only one example)

People are not taught to be interrogators in school, before the Internet, or software, it was something else that people just blindly internalised.

Similarly, I don't know much of this as I haven't been following mainstream developer discourse, but I think the default way to implement login/user authentication nowadays is to delegate it to "Firebase"

I did a presentation once about xmpp in my company. I got two questions from people:

- is the company mandating we change chats again? Do we have to use this? - i dont care because its never gonna change and we are doomed to use whatever the executives say. We have no power

What about unions?

Its similar reactions for anything political or change in general

Time to unionize I suppose

> What about unions? These dont exist in tech afaik. Only recently did they start appearing in gaming industry because of how bad the abuse is getting ↺

> Time to unionize I suppose 👆️ ↺

Are you from USA or Europe?

I've been trying to figure out if the tech unionization effort is better in Europe than it is in USA but it's a bit hard to figure out

Im in Finland/EU. Anything union/cooperative is seen as bad and inneficient. Only capitalism and individuality.

At least in East EU that i have been its bad

I havent seen a country with good union attitude or cooperatives.

> Time to unionize I suppose 👆️ ↺

France has started to see some initiative in the tech union sector, which is very good, but still far from other domains (and most importantly from a critical mass that can change things)

> Also the "people nowadays" show the context that person is think of btw. And that google chat is the same as hangouts. > > Its either nostalgia lenses of an imaginary past when people cared, or ageism that kids now are stupid. MSavoritias (fae,ve): without calling people "stupid", it's pretty well substantiated that "kids today" know how to use computers much less than the kids of generations prior. My take is that current breed of OSes and especially mobile ones (iOS/Android) do an excellent job at making users obedient and captive consumers

rom1dep: that is a nice theory but what we see is the exact oposite. 🙂 Companies try to cater to young people (with privacy, encryption, safety features etc.) We have more programmers than ever before and people know a lot more things that before about tech (see for example a whole lot of technical talk that has entered the mainstream).

It works too good most of the time 😀. I started tinkering and reading about how to, to get some mods for games working and windows bluescreens....

I do agree that gnu, fsf and all the rest have failed to gather people but that is their fault really 🤷‍♂️ rust did attract people fine or javascript. Or the open source conferences.

And lets not forget the anxiety of change we have over consent and CoCs and diversity now because young people have more social awareness. The question is will XMPP adapt?

> rom1dep: that is a nice theory but what we see is the exact oposite. 🙂 > > Companies try to cater to young people (with privacy, encryption, safety features etc.) We have more programmers than ever before and people know a lot more things that before about tech (see for example a whole lot of technical talk that has entered the mainstream). Sure there are more programmers than ever before, that doesn't mean anything about average tech litteracy. And for tech entering the mainstream, I'm not sure what you are referring to. Hacking do appears often in the news these days, but neither journalists nor the general public are competent and so it boils down to "China hacked a large Microsoft file sharing solution" and nobody gets to learn anything about what actually happened. ↺

> I do agree that gnu, fsf and all the rest have failed to gather people but that is their fault really 🤷‍♂️ rust did attract people fine or javascript. Or the open source conferences. A big chunk of today's tech stack is built on volunteer's unpaid and underappreciated opensource effort, and those are the ones propping-up the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. For those companies, this is pure financial pragmatism (outsourcing work) and nothing ideological. For one thing, GNU is a liability to them, and that's why you've been seeing BSD/MIT-licensed stuff accelerating faster than GNU (LLVM vs GCC, …). I'm sympathetic to the FSF, but you can see today in developer forums how much debate about "free vs opensource": the "modern average developer" just doesn't care as much. Opensource has won, at the detriment of FOSS. ↺

sorry for the wall of texts

funny how that piece is more than a decade-old by now http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Oof i recall that piece, and yeah. Quite true.

rom1dep: just because people don't make the same choices as you, doesnt mean they dont know or are "obidient", or not smart. Try to listen more on what people do know and why they picked the things they picked. The answers may surprise you

This will help also XMPP too of course. Learning why people dont use XMPP instead of saying "kids these days" or its "big tech" helps puts things in perspective

> rom1dep: just because people don't make the same choices as you, doesnt mean they dont know or are "obidient", or not smart. > > Try to listen more on what people do know and why they picked the things they picked. The answers may surprise you you seem to imply that this is a matter of opinion. It's not. Current OSes (iOS, Android, W11) are engineered to turn you into an apps/content consumer, with the vendor having a monopoly on their distribution via a walled-garden store they only control. This can't be news to you? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/apple-gives-eu-users-app-store-options-in-attempt-to-avoid-massive-fines/ In practice, users can't install what they want, what's allowed lies in the hands of a moralizing and censoring entity. The cost of non-obedience on those platform is loss of functionality (you probably can't use payment systems or some governmental/banking apps on rooted devices). ↺

> Try to listen more on what people do know and why they picked the things they picked. The answers may surprise you You come across as patronizing > Learning why people dont use XMPP instead of saying "kids these days" or its "big tech" helps puts things in perspective I don't disagree with that (that's putting words in my mouth, too). But if I may add something: you would be a fool to think that technical merit has much to do with what people use and do.

Complain all you want about "stupid" normal people using microsoft products or whatever, by do notice how even this channel/topic and xsf use microsoft github. Glass houses, all that...

I never said it did. You just seemed to have the common misconception that people dont know about XMPP or their privacy rights/tech in general well enough to make "the correct" choice (if such a thing exists) . I argue that people know (and value their privacy) and they know (or can understand) what XMPP or email is. They just rejected it because its not for them. Pretending and treating people like they don't understand "enough" to choose XMPP or whatever else we like, will only push people away.

The rest of my family use whatsapp because others they know use it, and I'm the weirdo with a perfectly functioning xmpp server they refuse to use because "I don't want another app". That's it. Nothing more complicated than that. There are not technical nor privacy reasons they care about. The platforms are "safe enough" as far as they are concerned.

They understand my reasons just fine. They just don't care.

>> rom1dep: just because people don't make the same choices as you, doesnt mean they dont know or are "obidient", or not smart. >> >> Try to listen more on what people do know and why they picked the things they picked. The answers may surprise you > you seem to imply that this is a matter of opinion. It's not. Current OSes (iOS, Android, W11) are engineered to turn you into an apps/content consumer, with the vendor having a monopoly on their distribution via a walled-garden store they only control. This can't be news to you? > https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/apple-gives-eu-users-app-store-options-in-attempt-to-avoid-massive-fines/ > In practice, users can't install what they want, what's allowed lies in the hands of a moralizing and censoring entity. The cost of non-obedience on those platform is loss of functionality (you probably can't use payment systems or some governmental/banking apps on rooted devices). I dont see what this has to do with anything, (and linux is not working any better on phones or desktops) ↺

SFC uses Facebook and YouTube because "it's where people are". And similarly funds projects on microsoft github. There's always an excuse for sacrificing your core principles. If you even have some.

> Pretending and treating people like they don't understand "enough" to choose XMPP or whatever else we like, will only push people away. First, I didn't say that, and second, could it be that there's some nuance to this and that both sides of the argument are valid? A counter-example: my whole family (and many of my friends) are on XMPP and happy at that: it just works© for them. But they also depend on WhatsApp, because of the network effects of it, and it being a monopolistic/captive platform.

> I dont see what this has to do with anything, (and linux is not working any better on phones or desktops) it has to do with apple and google stores being engineered to control their users, or your disagreeing point about "obedience"

Public xmpp channels control their users too. Moderator "offtopic" warning in 3 2 1...

I use google and windows 🙂 also i have used macs too. They are pretty good and i find your statement hyperbolic and on the insulting side. Same with whatsapp.

Interestingly quicky and prav try to solve the sign up problem

They do get a lot of hate tho too

> rako> France has started to see some initiative in the tech union sector, which is very good, but still far from other domains (and most importantly from a critical mass that can change things) Yes! Happy to see things like Solidaire Informatique happening :)

We still dont have group calls btw. Not that that would change anything

> SFC uses Facebook and YouTube because "it's where people are". And similarly funds projects on microsoft github. There's always an excuse for sacrificing your core principles. If you even have some. True. Plus afaik there is no alternative to either of them so people are stuck. Same with whatsapp and discord and things ↺

> SFC uses Facebook and YouTube because "it's where people are". And similarly funds projects on microsoft github. There's always an excuse for sacrificing your core principles. If you even have some. It's true though. We have to remember: is the goal to be free or to become free ? If it's the former, only those who have large amounts of available time and energy can do the individual path to be free. I believe the goal is the second one, so we have to bring people from where they are ↺

>> SFC uses Facebook and YouTube because "it's where people are". And similarly funds projects on microsoft github. There's always an excuse for sacrificing your core principles. If you even have some. > True. Plus afaik there is no alternative to either of them so people are stuck. Same with whatsapp and discord and things There is always an alternative to say "no", but it can make life more difficult as an oddball.

> i find your statement hyperbolic and on the insulting side. mine? In which way exactly?

> financial pragmatism (outsourcing work) and nothing ideological Breaking news: "financial pragmatism" is also an ideology.

rom1dep, ^

>> SFC uses Facebook and YouTube because "it's where people are". And similarly funds projects on microsoft github. There's always an excuse for sacrificing your core principles. If you even have some. > It's true though. We have to remember: is the goal to be free or to become free ? If it's the former, only those who have large amounts of available time and energy can do the individual path to be free. I believe the goal is the second one, so we have to bring people from where they are 👍 ↺

sure.

> It's true though. We have to remember: is the goal to be free or to become free ? If it's the former, only those who have large amounts of available time and energy can do the individual path to be free. I believe the goal is the second one, so we have to bring people from where they are Free platforms exist, are plentiful, and can welcome more people. I think the goal is to move people to those platforms, so it makes sense to be on Youtube, Meta, Twitter, etc... ↺

"nothing ideological favour of opensource/FOSS" is how I intended it to be read in this context

>> i find your statement hyperbolic and on the insulting side. > mine? In which way exactly? As i have been saying, its simplistic to think that people use discord because they are "obidient". Simplist and insulting that is, because people are making their own choices as i said, and just because you disagree with why they dont use XMPP it doesnt mean they are wrong or that big tech makes them "obidient". ↺

>> It's true though. We have to remember: is the goal to be free or to become free ? If it's the former, only those who have large amounts of available time and energy can do the individual path to be free. I believe the goal is the second one, so we have to bring people from where they are > Free platforms exist, are plentiful, and can welcome more people. I think the goal is to move people to those platforms, so it makes sense to be on Youtube, Meta, Twitter, etc... Disagree. The more you use those, the more you promote and maintain their dominant position.

> russdacic: Let's start with waiting more than 5 minutes for an answer 😉 😂 ↺

>> Free platforms exist, are plentiful, and can welcome more people. I think the goal is to move people to those platforms, so it makes sense to be on Youtube, Meta, Twitter, etc... > Disagree. The more you use those, the more you promote and maintain their dominant position. You have failed to give alternatives tho besides saying "no". What does "no" mean? ↺

> >> It's true though. We have to remember: is the goal to be free or to become free ? If it's the former, only those who have large amounts of available time and energy can do the individual path to be free. I believe the goal is the second one, so we have to bring people from where they are > > Free platforms exist, are plentiful, and can welcome more people. I think the goal is to move people to those platforms, so it makes sense to be on Youtube, Meta, Twitter, etc... > Disagree. The more you use those, the more you promote and maintain their dominant position. In my message I forgot the most important: "if the goal is to switch people over" ↺

Leave the internet?

Can we reset this conversation? Too many "what I actually meant" and "what you actually meant" diffs piling up to follow what exactly is being discussed 😅

MSavoritias (fae,ve): it seems pretty clear we are writing past one another messages and I don't think I want to entertain that further. The "obedience" thing that triggered you was about modern operating systems, in the context of why "kids these days" have it different than before. You will be hard pressed to find a message of mine with "discord" in it. The goalposts have shifted dramatically.

> How does one suggest to make Xmpp (forgive me) popular again? Email is federated but nowadays it seems people like their chats fairly unfederated and walled-garden-y.. I don't really see any improvement between ye olde hangouts and Google chat I've been trying to get a full social network going for a while. I think that's the way to go. Build something much more than a server merely existing in the ether. Create and foster a community. Put money and serious effort behind it. Find a niche and target audience. Give them something. XMPP is just one piece of that. The regulars won't know what they're getting into but, eventually the greatness of the technology and UI/UX will convince them. ↺

> In my message I forgot the most important: "if the goal is to switch people over" You can't expect billions of people to stop using Meta product just because they realize it's bad, there needs to be a path towards free platforms, with those who "already know" helping those who don't. But it always starts from the Bad Place. Nothing of value will ever be accomplished by assuming those who are still in the Bad Place are "stupid" or whatever ↺

> This is also why there's a lot of fuss about Hotmail/Outlook today. Microsoft as an E-Mail provider is undoubtedly unfit for purpose, but children signing up on Outlook do not realize that, but even business people do not realize it. It's insane. Maybe more people should blog about how much PITA Microsoft is for them. 💯 ↺

How to occupy randoms in XMPP rooms 101: Join a room, ask why XMPP isn't successful and leave.

> People are not taught to be interrogators in school, before the Internet, or software, it was something else that people just blindly internalised. 💯 ↺

rom1dep, do you mind stating again what your original point was (or if your opinion has changed in the meantime, then whatever your new point is)?

> Time to unionize I suppose 👆️ ↺

> MSavoritias (fae,ve): it seems pretty clear we are writing past one another messages and I don't think I want to entertain that further. The "obedience" thing that triggered you was about modern operating systems, in the context of why "kids these days" have it different than before. You will be hard pressed to find a message of mine with "discord" in it. The goalposts have shifted dramatically. coming up with a specific example has little relevance, that is why i said discord. also its more on topic. it has little relevance because the "kids these days don't know" thinking is there in both of them. ↺

my point was to push back on the "kids these days", "long ago (in a galaxy far far away) we were smarter/hackers" myth that is not true

>> Also the "people nowadays" show the context that person is think of btw. And that google chat is the same as hangouts. >> >> Its either nostalgia lenses of an imaginary past when people cared, or ageism that kids now are stupid. > MSavoritias (fae,ve): without calling people "stupid", it's pretty well substantiated that "kids today" know how to use computers much less than the kids of generations prior. My take is that current breed of OSes and especially mobile ones (iOS/Android) do an excellent job at making users obedient and captive consumers 💯 ↺

> How to occupy randoms in XMPP rooms 101: Join a room, ask why XMPP isn't successful and leave. lmao that person did leave ↺

> You can't expect billions of people to stop using Meta product just because they realize it's bad, there needs to be a path towards free platforms, with those who "already know" helping those who don't. But it always starts from the Bad Place. Nothing of value will ever be accomplished by assuming those who are still in the Bad Place are "stupid" or whatever personally, I think the current landscape is stable and consolidated, I don't expect that much will happen in the next years to tip the scales in favour of XMPP (perhaps an implosion of Matrix can gain XMPP some marginal users). The general population has had their expectations set and matched years ago. Where I see an opportunity for XMPP to ever shine is with IM protocol fatigue: people can (and do) get tired of rebooting their whole IM life every other year because a protocol became user-hostile/discontinued. XMPP (and federated protocols) are interesting in that they are immune to that, that's what what sets them apart. When inevitably WhatsApp needs a successor, the only way for it to be XMPP and not Telegram/Signal/Whatever centralized is for people to get tired of siloes. If people's awareness can't grow sufficiently by then, I hope lawmakers would (and in EU with the DMA there's some burgeoning hope). ↺

> rom1dep: that is a nice theory but what we see is the exact oposite. 🙂 > > Companies try to cater to young people (with privacy, encryption, safety features etc.) We have more programmers than ever before and people know a lot more things that before about tech (see for example a whole lot of technical talk that has entered the mainstream). I'd argue that programmers are definitely not hackers. I used to ride public transit regularly near a tech school back in 2013-ish. 98% of what I heard was people talking about generic text book stuff. It was nothing more than a "good career" for them. No passion or curiosity. No real tinkering. Just going with the status quo. ↺

Right, I see the exodus to Signal as a missed opportunity, but my friends and I tried and XMPP just wasn't in a good enough state then for people to clear all the hurdles. If something like that happened today I think I'd have relatively more success getting people onto Quicksy/Prav at least ✏

(Relatively being a key word of course)

I also don't think people truly know about computers. I'd hard pressed to believe that most "gamer" types could do Linux From Scratch or even Gentoo. They can build desktops by putting *square pegs in square holes*. What most people know these days is how to consume and navigate *apps*. Affordable powerful machines and connectivity have made things accessible but, that doesn't mean there's been a significant increase in how many people have a deep knowledge. It's the same with cars. Nearly everyone's got one but, how many can do any maintanence or drive properly? lol....

>> rom1dep: that is a nice theory but what we see is the exact oposite. 🙂 >> >> Companies try to cater to young people (with privacy, encryption, safety features etc.) We have more programmers than ever before and people know a lot more things that before about tech (see for example a whole lot of technical talk that has entered the mainstream). > Sure there are more programmers than ever before, that doesn't mean anything about average tech litteracy. > And for tech entering the mainstream, I'm not sure what you are referring to. Hacking do appears often in the news these days, but neither journalists nor the general public are competent and so it boils down to "China hacked a large Microsoft file sharing solution" and nobody gets to learn anything about what actually happened. 💯 ↺

A testament to all the work that's been put in to make computers more accessible?

>> I do agree that gnu, fsf and all the rest have failed to gather people but that is their fault really 🤷‍♂️ rust did attract people fine or javascript. Or the open source conferences. > A big chunk of today's tech stack is built on volunteer's unpaid and underappreciated opensource effort, and those are the ones propping-up the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. For those companies, this is pure financial pragmatism (outsourcing work) and nothing ideological. For one thing, GNU is a liability to them, and that's why you've been seeing BSD/MIT-licensed stuff accelerating faster than GNU (LLVM vs GCC, …). I'm sympathetic to the FSF, but you can see today in developer forums how much debate about "free vs opensource": the "modern average developer" just doesn't care as much. Opensource has won, at the detriment of FOSS. 💯 ↺

> This will help also XMPP too of course. Learning why people dont use XMPP instead of saying "kids these days" or its "big tech" helps puts things in perspective 👍 ↺

> Complain all you want about "stupid" normal people using microsoft products or whatever, by do notice how even this channel/topic and xsf use microsoft github. Glass houses, all that... 👎 ↺

> rom1dep, do you mind stating again what your original point was (or if your opinion has changed in the meantime, then whatever your new point is)? the very original point was that "kids these days" (being less tech-literate) is a thing, pretending otherwise isn't constructive. Also, that's none of their (kids') fault: they have had big-tech working actively against them, increasingly stripping them from their freedoms. Then there was a point about why FSF "failed", which I answered by drawing a parallel with the same powers being against GPL and the fight being uphill. ↺

> Complain all you want about "stupid" normal people using microsoft products or whatever, by do notice how even this channel/topic and xsf use microsoft github. Glass houses, all that... Yeah, why are they using m$ github? That really rubs me the wrong way. Is money part of the issue? What would it cost to switch to a self-hosted gitlab or whatever is good these days? (I'm out of the loop on this one, now. Looked at their site earlier and couldn't even find the self-hosted info.) ↺

> A testament to all the work that's been put in to make computers more accessible? you can make computers more accessible while not locking them down. I mean, Linux evolutions over the past 15 years are a pretty good example of it (while windows and OSX are increasingly shutting them down to power-users) ✏ ↺

> > A testament to all the work that's been put in to make computers more accessible? > you can make computers more accessible while not locking them down. I mean, Linux evolutions over the past 15 years are a pretty good example of it (while windows and OSX are increasingly shutting them down to power-users) Agreed. It's a pity that proprietary companies who want to lock people in got there first ↺

My point was more about the tech literacy thing and which people we're counting

As digital technology (computers, smartphones) has become more accessible to people, we have *more* people using it who wouldn't have used it at all earlier

So if we asked about awareness of issues, we'd find people less aware *on average* because people who used computers earlier were more likely to be actively interested, whereas nowadays we also have a large proportion who are just using them as tools for office work or biology or whatever it is

> They understand my reasons just fine. They just don't care. 👍 ↺

Which is (a) a good thing, because we've managed to make technology reach more people, but also maybe (b) a bad thing if we haven't managed to convey awareness of tech related issues on the same scale

>> Free platforms exist, are plentiful, and can welcome more people. I think the goal is to move people to those platforms, so it makes sense to be on Youtube, Meta, Twitter, etc... > Disagree. The more you use those, the more you promote and maintain their dominant position. 👍 ↺

By the way, I do think there is awareness in tech circles (and even general reporting) about privacy and security. Not that it's always spot on, i.e. I know some people who fell for Telegram's marketing about being E2EE, but at least people know what privacy is and think it somewhat important (among other things they consider important)

> As digital technology (computers, smartphones) has become more accessible to people, we have *more* people using it who wouldn't have used it at all earlier The elephant in the room lies in the usage of computers over time. While they relate on technical implementation details, the usage is pretty different. Who was using a computer 30 years ago? For what purpose? And today? We went from mostly "productive" use-cases to devices optimized for "consumption". IOW, we do have more users of "computers" today, but we can't extrapolate from that the profile of the "average computer user" from back then vs today. ↺

>> rom1dep, do you mind stating again what your original point was (or if your opinion has changed in the meantime, then whatever your new point is)? > the very original point was that "kids these days" (being less tech-literate) is a thing, pretending otherwise isn't constructive. Also, that's none of their (kids') fault: they have had big-tech working actively against them, increasingly stripping them from their freedoms. > Then there was a point about why FSF "failed", which I answered by drawing a parallel with the same powers being against GPL and the fight being uphill. GPL/copylefty promotion is like a religious movement, and the "freedom" argument is a hard sell, IMO, when compared with BSD style. I've been kicked out of several mucs for not being in line with the clergy on this and other things BTW.

I think the main challenges for XMPP now would be to spread awareness about federation specifically, as well as continue making improvements on technical front to get over the "that's nice and all but X app I use has Y feature which I can't do without" barrier

>> You can't expect billions of people to stop using Meta product just because they realize it's bad, there needs to be a path towards free platforms, with those who "already know" helping those who don't. But it always starts from the Bad Place. Nothing of value will ever be accomplished by assuming those who are still in the Bad Place are "stupid" or whatever > personally, I think the current landscape is stable and consolidated, I don't expect that much will happen in the next years to tip the scales in favour of XMPP (perhaps an implosion of Matrix can gain XMPP some marginal users). The general population has had their expectations set and matched years ago. Where I see an opportunity for XMPP to ever shine is with IM protocol fatigue: people can (and do) get tired of rebooting their whole IM life every other year because a protocol became user-hostile/discontinued. > XMPP (and federated protocols) are interesting in that they are immune to that, that's what what sets them apart. When inevitably WhatsApp needs a successor, the only way for it to be XMPP and not Telegram/Signal/Whatever centralized is for people to get tired of siloes. If people's awareness can't grow sufficiently by then, I hope lawmakers would (and in EU with the DMA there's some burgeoning hope). 💯 ↺

> >> rom1dep, do you mind stating again what your original point was (or if your opinion has changed in the meantime, then whatever your new point is)? > > the very original point was that "kids these days" (being less tech-literate) is a thing, pretending otherwise isn't constructive. Also, that's none of their (kids') fault: they have had big-tech working actively against them, increasingly stripping them from their freedoms. > > Then there was a point about why FSF "failed", which I answered by drawing a parallel with the same powers being against GPL and the fight being uphill. > > GPL/copylefty promotion is like a religious movement, and the "freedom" argument is a hard sell, IMO, when compared with BSD style. I've been kicked out of several mucs for not being in line with the clergy on this and other things BTW. I mean, those ideas have merit, irrespective of who is pushing them/how. I'm personally sympathetic to both sides. I also observe that MIT/BSD benefited more Apple than the opensource communities, further skewing the power imbalance to our disadvantage. ↺

What's the BSD style?

>> rom1dep, do you mind stating again what your original point was (or if your opinion has changed in the meantime, then whatever your new point is)? > the very original point was that "kids these days" (being less tech-literate) is a thing, pretending otherwise isn't constructive. Also, that's none of their (kids') fault: they have had big-tech working actively against them, increasingly stripping them from their freedoms. > Then there was a point about why FSF "failed", which I answered by drawing a parallel with the same powers being against GPL and the fight being uphill. 💯 ↺

>> A testament to all the work that's been put in to make computers more accessible? > you can make computers more accessible while not locking them down. I mean, Linux evolutions over the past 15 years are a pretty good example of it (while windows and OSX are increasingly shutting them down to power-users) 💯 ↺

> By the way, I do think there is awareness in tech circles (and even general reporting) about privacy and security. Not that it's always spot on, i.e. I know some people who fell for Telegram's marketing about being E2EE, but at least people know what privacy is and think it somewhat important (among other things they consider important) 👍 ↺

(it's also important to remember the cultural and political landscape in which those ideologies emerged in the first place)

I think one of XMPP's greatest testaments is how long it's been around and how many other chats are relying on it without really telling anyone. It's not some fad IM app. It's the oldest besides IRC and E-mail and it's still being actively developed and improved on both server side and the clients. I'd like to think these are good reasons for people to switch. Come somewhere stable and tell people to try it, use encryption, or goodbye. Respect me and not just my privacy but, your own. That's what I've said to people. It worked for a few and other people expedited themselves out of my life.

> I think the main challenges for XMPP now would be to spread awareness about federation specifically, as well as continue making improvements on technical front to get over the "that's nice and all but X app I use has Y feature which I can't do without" barrier "XMPP, the last protocol you will ever need" is a catchy and attractive concept, I suspect, but as low as we want to set the entry bar, we can't completely disappear the technical reality (it's not an app, it's not a service, it's a protocol, you need to pick a server to host your account and run the service on your behalf, this server may have downtime, etc). ↺

>> I think the main challenges for XMPP now would be to spread awareness about federation specifically, as well as continue making improvements on technical front to get over the "that's nice and all but X app I use has Y feature which I can't do without" barrier > "XMPP, the last protocol you will ever need" is a catchy and attractive concept, I suspect, but as low as we want to set the entry bar, we can't completely disappear the technical reality (it's not an app, it's not a service, it's a protocol, you need to pick a server to host your account and run the service on your behalf, this server may have downtime, etc). 💯 ↺

What’s the best XMPP server software for personal use that is reliable and easy to set up?

>> I think the main challenges for XMPP now would be to spread awareness about federation specifically, as well as continue making improvements on technical front to get over the "that's nice and all but X app I use has Y feature which I can't do without" barrier > "XMPP, the last protocol you will ever need" is a catchy and attractive concept, I suspect, but as low as we want to set the entry bar, we can't completely disappear the technical reality (it's not an app, it's not a service, it's a protocol, you need to pick a server to host your account and run the service on your behalf, this server may have downtime, etc). I think a short period of downtime every so often is something many people can handle. Especially people who play games or use windoze. (Does that nonoperating system 🤪 still randomly update and reboot on its own? I heard it even erases peoples ~/. lolol) I think it's up to us more techy folks to set up a VPS for our circles and run a handful of software like XMPP, Bitwarden, Gallery or Piwigo, GNUsocial, and whatever else is useful to the group. There also needs to be more small & medium size companies who will do this sort of thing. That way, when one of us has an rm -r /* IRL, it can be in our Will to keep the server running and some money to pay for it for a while. ↺

> What’s the best XMPP server software for personal use that is reliable and easy to set up? 😂 ↺

> What’s the best XMPP server software for personal use that is reliable and easy to set up? I like MetronomeIM which was originally forked from Prosody. However they are much different these days. ↺

>> What’s the best XMPP server software for personal use that is reliable and easy to set up? > I like MetronomeIM which was originally forked from Prosody. However they are much different these days. Thanks for the guidance. I am a wanderer still learning the paths of XMPP. I will take MetronomeIM as my companion and begin my journey. ↺

> Thanks for the guidance. I am a wanderer still learning the paths of XMPP. I will take MetronomeIM as my companion and begin my journey. what are your expectations? constraints? level of sysadmin proficiency? ↺

Also, do you have a server (eg. a VPS) already or will you be setting up one especially for this?

> I think a short period of downtime every so often is something many people can handle. Especially people who play games or use windoze. (Does that nonoperating system 🤪 still randomly update and reboot on its own? I heard it even erases peoples ~/. lolol) > > I think it's up to us more techy folks to set up a VPS for our circles and run a handful of software like XMPP, Bitwarden, Gallery or Piwigo, GNUsocial, and whatever else is useful to the group. > > There also needs to be more small & medium size companies who will do this sort of thing. That way, when one of us has an rm -r /* IRL, it can be in our Will to keep the server running and some money to pay for it for a while. how much more do you think we can do, realistically? How much of an impact will this have? ↺

> So if we asked about awareness of issues, we'd find people less aware *on average* because people who used computers earlier were more likely to be actively interested, whereas nowadays we also have a large proportion who are just using them as tools for office work or biology or whatever it is IMO this is a good point and gets close to also recognizing the increased complexity of other technical and non tech specialities, and just because you chose to specialize in computer tech, does not make you a know it all in all topics. Nobody has that much time or brain.

>> Thanks for the guidance. I am a wanderer still learning the paths of XMPP. I will take MetronomeIM as my companion and begin my journey. > what are your expectations? constraints? level of sysadmin proficiency? My expectations are simple: To master the craft enough to wield it for my own quests. Constraints are the wild lands of time and resources, ever scarce. As for sysadmin skills, I am but a fledgling, eager to learn the ancient runes and forge my way. ↺

Prosody is a simple server that would allow you to hone your skills. Snikket will make it easier for your friends to sign up, which would provide good companionship, but the setup instructions use Docker which may obscure some of the ancient runes you seek 😉

Metronome is forked from Prosody, so even if you install that you'll end up having to consult Prosody docs for a lot of things. I'd say start with Prosody and then switch later if you feel the need

> My expectations are simple: To master the craft enough to wield it for my own quests. > Constraints are the wild lands of time and resources, ever scarce. > As for sysadmin skills, I am but a fledgling, eager to learn the ancient runes and forge my way. if you already run a server with the usual self-hosted stacks, nothing should scare you from running one of the major XMPP servers (ejabberd/prosody). Those are rock-solid and very approachable. ejabberd has maybe more "batteries included", I suspect snikket smoothens some of that. ↺

Your words carry the weight of experience, and I take them to heart. I shall begin with Prosody, learn its runes, walk its paths, and let its simplicity temper my skills. If the winds change, I will remember Metronome and Snikket as allies further down the road. Gratitude for the light in the fog.

>> I think a short period of downtime every so often is something many people can handle. Especially people who play games or use windoze. (Does that nonoperating system 🤪 still randomly update and reboot on its own? I heard it even erases peoples ~/. lolol) >> >> I think it's up to us more techy folks to set up a VPS for our circles and run a handful of software like XMPP, Bitwarden, Gallery or Piwigo, GNUsocial, and whatever else is useful to the group. >> >> There also needs to be more small & medium size companies who will do this sort of thing. That way, when one of us has an rm -r /* IRL, it can be in our Will to keep the server running and some money to pay for it for a while. > how much more do you think we can do, realistically? How much of an impact will this have? What do you mean by "we"? Us techies for our friends & family? I think if we do all the work and on boarding, it can go a long way. I think those of us who got caught up in the hype of various other projects or centralized softwares... maybe it wasn't so good. Every time we're "wrong" it makes a huge difference. Every little snag along the way makes a lasting impression against us, what we use, and free software in general. Which is why it's important to stay with the tried & true softwares that have been around for several years. ↺

Isn't metronome on lifesupport or even completely dead?

> Your words carry the weight of experience, and I take them to heart. > I shall begin with Prosody, learn its runes, walk its paths, and let its simplicity temper my skills. > If the winds change, I will remember Metronome and Snikket as allies further down the road. > Gratitude for the light in the fog. prosody/metronome/snikket have the same technical fundations. If, for some reason, you want to try something different, ejabberd should be a good alternative ↺

Snikket is easy setup and forgot, prosody is if you like to tinker

>> how much more do you think we can do, realistically? How much of an impact will this have? > What do you mean by "we"? Us techies for our friends & family? I think if we do all the work and on boarding, it can go a long way. > > I think those of us who got caught up in the hype of various other projects or centralized softwares... maybe it wasn't so good. Every time we're "wrong" it makes a huge difference. Every little snag along the way makes a lasting impression against us, what we use, and free software in general. Which is why it's important to stay with the tried & true softwares that have been around for several years. Also, like I was saying earlier: start a niche community. Maybe a Neighborhood Association or Food Not Bombs chapter. Along with a webpage, blog, and microblog, have a chatroom using XMPP. ↺

Snikket is good from what I remember. Never used it but, I remember when they started and aimed to be the complete package. IIRC, they offer paid servers or something. Probably the easiest, most comprehensive server set up for general use. It looks like Maranda from Aria-Net is still around running MetronomeIM. He's been running a Matrix server, too, for the last few years. I chose it because it emphesised microblogging support and was also setting up a GNUsocial instance.

P.S. GNU Social can use XMPP for posting status updates as well as reading feeds. Eventually... there will be integration to use it to send encrypted PMs and MUCs for the Groups. Among other use cases.

https://gnusocial.rocks

Reminds me of the old russian blogging thing called juick

>> >> GPL/copylefty promotion is like a religious movement, and the "freedom" argument is a hard sell, IMO, when compared with BSD style. I've been kicked out of several mucs for not being in line with the clergy on this and other things BTW. > I mean, those ideas have merit, irrespective of who is pushing them/how. I'm personally sympathetic to both sides. I also observe that MIT/BSD benefited more Apple than the opensource communities, further skewing the power imbalance to our disadvantage. BSD is in Apple products, MINIX is in Intel et al products, Linux is in a bunch of products. Did licenses really make that much difference in "power imbalance", or was in funding?

> https://gnusocial.rocks Wait, is that a fork of GNU Social ↺

Main one is the https://gnusocial.network/

> P.S. GNU Social can use XMPP for posting status updates as well as reading feeds. Eventually... there will be integration to use it to send encrypted PMs and MUCs for the Groups. Among other use cases. Would be fun to have something in XMPP that allow to publish articles, subscribe to them, have blogs, comments, likes and other stuff like that :p ✏ ↺

> Also, like I was saying earlier: start a niche community. Maybe a Neighborhood Association or Food Not Bombs chapter. Along with a webpage, blog, and microblog, have a chatroom using XMPP. I mean, that's probably something a 1 in 10000 individual could do, perhaps a 1 in 100000 in developing countries. I don't think it's going to change the status quo drastically. And don't tell me I'm a naysayer/pessimistic, I'm operating two services, one with about 450 accounts and one with 50. ↺

> >> > >> GPL/copylefty promotion is like a religious movement, and the "freedom" argument is a hard sell, IMO, when compared with BSD style. I've been kicked out of several mucs for not being in line with the clergy on this and other things BTW. > > I mean, those ideas have merit, irrespective of who is pushing them/how. I'm personally sympathetic to both sides. I also observe that MIT/BSD benefited more Apple than the opensource communities, further skewing the power imbalance to our disadvantage. > BSD is in Apple products, MINIX is in Intel et al products, Linux is in a bunch of products. Did licenses really make that much difference in "power imbalance", or was in funding? https://web.archive.org/web/20241101104347/http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ ↺

> Also the "people nowadays" show the context that person is thinking of btw. And that google chat is the same as hangouts. > > Its either nostalgia lenses of an imaginary past when people cared, or ageism that kids now are stupid. 👍 ↺

> People are not taught to be interrogators in school, before the Internet, or software, it was something else that people just blindly internalised. 💯 ↺

rom1dep: >> BSD is in Apple products, MINIX is in Intel et al products, Linux is in a bunch of products. Did licenses really make that much difference in "power imbalance", or was in funding? > https://web.archive.org/web/20241101104347/http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ Other than possible appearance of a correlation (not proof of causation) in a 2012 (?) blog post, what is your point from this? Apple may have rewritten some packages and had enough funding to do so? I meant bigger picture what difference did it make?

> This will help also XMPP too of course. Learning why people dont use XMPP instead of saying "kids these days" or its "big tech" helps puts things in perspective One of my friends ditched XMPP for Signal because he did not like the UI of Cheogram and Gajim, and he also finds XMPP server outages to be unacceptable. ↺

I do think XMPP could really benefit from P2P support, but that's a major architectural change.

Or client-side, portable identities with servers just routing them

But that's another huge architectural change

opinionplatform.org: excuse the tone, but how large/wealthy do you think Apple is nowadays, how much of it was made possible thanks to opensource technologies (which are the basis of everything electronics since the iPod or so), and how much of this value has been shared with those who enabled it. Apple is the largest profiteer of opensource and GPL gets in their way of squeezing more free labour for themselves

> One of my friends ditched XMPP for Signal because he did not like the UI of Cheogram and Gajim, and he also finds XMPP server outages to be unacceptable. I really dislike how MUCs are handled - all my clients have to rejoin all the MUCs if my server or the server hosting them goes down ↺

> Or client-side, portable identities with servers just routing them sounds like SimpleX. But you lose the meta-data protection that having a main server as your home offers. Its kinda like a build in VPN, you only ever connect to that one server and don't need to worry about untrusted relays logging connection data etc. ↺

of course this assumes you can trust your server, but "trustless" designs like SimpleX aims for usually end up being footguns for most people.

> One of my friends ditched XMPP for Signal because he did not like the UI of Cheogram and Gajim, and he also finds XMPP server outages to be unacceptable. Kinda funny given the outages that Signal regularly suffers from. Must be selective memory or a especially unstable XMPP server. ↺

Serverless p2p systems usually end up duplicating servers but with a different name, like "supernode" or something, and then you have no control over which servers your data go thorugh. Might as well have the simple client→server→server→client architecture we have now.

✏

Brothers and sisters of snow and protocol, https://chat.modernxmpp.org/paste/a942d09a-b7dc-4271-8a97-b5b356964ef2 ✏

rom1dep: > opinionplatform.org: excuse the tone, but how large/wealthy do you think Apple is nowadays, how much of it was made possible thanks to opensource technologies (which are the basis of everything electronics since the iPod or so), and how much of this value has been shared with those who enabled it. Apple is the largest profiteer of opensource and GPL gets in their way of squeezing more free labour for themselves Large enough even the Sopranos, Snikket and Co. make apps for iPhone. Cheap labor, if not free for them. Apple makes profits by selling products people choose to buy at high prices. Sure, they take advantage of other cheap labor too, but many people also profit from their stock...

My Prosody server connects users within its realm, but fails to share OMEMO messages and presence with other servers. The sacred whispers do not cross the borders. Wise warriors, what must I do to awaken full cross-server OMEMO and presence? Guide me in this unfinished battle.