I'm using Actor these days, made by former Telegram developers.
Coming along very nice in my opinion :)
Coming along very nice in my opinion :)
I'm not trying to make that thing look bad here. I'm interested, still haven't found the ~final~ IM solution (using Telegram for now though).
- open source, client and server
- federation (both for the ability to split the net/have a private/enterprise solution and for redundancy)
- multi device support (tablet, phone, desktop etc)
- clients for all major platforms (that is, not just mobile platforms)
- strong cryptography
- no phone number required (can be installed on your desktop/tablet only, doesn't _need_ a phone number but might offer to search for contacts that gave one instead)
Note that Telegram fails quite some of those, but as far as I'm aware it's the closest I can get at this point.
- We are completely open source under Apache License 2.0
- We are working on the federation. Unfortunately there are no production ready federation protocols at all. XMPP is dead.
- We are work on multiple devices
- We have Android, iOS, Win/Lin/Mac. Anything else? Windows Phone is dead too, other html5-based phones are not popular yet.
- We have two layer TLS with russian and us encryption together. We are in progress in porting Signal's end-to-end protocol.
- You can use email or phone based auth. Our Email-based auth is named "enterprise", but it is same as personal.
Questions:
1) My first "Why Actor" question still stands. How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions? The web page didn't help me.
2) How are you planning to make money/to stay in business?
Regarding the bullet points:
- How easy is it to build/run a server?
- Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix [1][2]. Did you look into that?
- Can you explain 'two layer TLS with russian and us encryption'? Or point me to a resource about that?
Yes, my pleasure.
> How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions?
We are replacement for Jabber with powerful productivity-related apps on desktop and people-friendly mobile apps. We are completely open, high performant out of the box. Unlike Jabber we are not non-profit that helps us keep development of the platform, but our sources are completely open.
> How are you planning to make money/to stay in business?
Actor is already profitable company. A lot of people want to make their own messaging solution, integrate to existing systems, make some customizations and even solve email overflow or other communication issues in the big organizations (with 100k+ of employees). Server can handle millions of users just like Telegram and people need it if they have resources to launch niche messaging app in some country, but don't want to spend years to build it (like we was). That's how we make money.
We are lack of resources for landing page development - all forces used at our desktop/web app. If someone want to join us just email me) at steve (at) actor.im :) We are hope that we will clean up all sych stuff on the next stage of our product.
> How easy is it to build/run a server?
Almost just like apt-get install actor with required configuration: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-bootstrap/tree/master/docs...
> Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix
Yes. We talked to them. Actually we use matrix ideas in our s2s protocol drafts: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-platform/blob/master/docs/...
One problem with matrix is that it is not considered as production ready, but actor is and already serve 100k's users on foreign instances and it is production ready. We will work on our draft and will then merge our ideas with matrix one.
Oh? The last I checked there were well over 100 public XMPP servers listed at IM Observatory. Those servers are federated. What would it take for XMPP to be not dead?
* https://www.xmpp.net/directory.php
Note that there are several popular server implementations in actual use and that the release dates for the software currently on the net mostly happened this year.
The thing is, all an IM provider has to do is create a XMPP transport for their protocol using the tons of existing XMPP software freely available and then you have XMPP federation. It isn't even that hard. So it always seems odd to hear that people absolutely can't interconnect with a large operating network that embodies the closest thing we have to an IM interoperability standard.
One thing shown not to work is creating yet another protocol under the theory that everyone else will become compatible with it. If you do that you are just wasting your time.
What makes you think so?
I'm also not sure a technology needs even one vendor to live. Say, BitTorrent surely didn't care whenever it's used by big corps or not.
There are no one large scale messaging that is not supported by at least one good vendor. XMPP started to die shortly after google disabled it's support in google talk.
And, for example, Signal essentially uses GCM (thus, XMPP, although in an uncommon manner) as a primary choice for their transport layer.
XMPP isn't dead. It's just that a) it has some warts and b) large vendors don't give a damn about interoperability or anything (Google tried to persuade others to interconnect, haven't worked for them, they shut it back) and prefer their own walled gardens.
use your own server, or use one of the many public ones. has clients for all major platforms, crypto is the best around (otr, gpg), does not require phone numbers or sim cards, is open and a public standard.
The big problem with that one was that
- clients are wildly varying in quality. Mobile clients are quite good by now, desktop clients are rather meh, ugly, all over the place
- multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history, which was a moving target and unsupported in most clients/servers last time I checked.
That ignores that you need a good number of other extensions to make XMPP mobile friendly (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages). XMPP isn't exactly mobile friendly (chattiness, bandwidth) either, as far as I am aware.
In short: Yeah, I would love to agree that XMPP is the solution. Right now I'd say it would be at best ~similar~ to Telegram: A solution with some (different) trade-offs.
0: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations
1: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challeng...
But - I just checked again: My xmpp server of choice (Prosody) doesn't support MAM today¹. That's a killer, without that xmpp isn't even in the same league as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. for me. I expect to be able to open my client and be able to continue a conversation at this point.
1: There's https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html but it is unclear if that's in a usable state. It states at the bottom of the page that this 'works' for 0.9 and 0.10, but the 'storage backend' sections gives an example that works for 0.10 only and links to https://prosody.im/doc/storage where you'll find a table with backends. ONLY the 'sql' backend seems to support the archive store, and that's for 0.10 only. 0.10 isn't released yet. The takeaway is: MAM seems to work if you're using the unreleased version 0.10 of prosody. And .. I haven't even checked the client support yet.
Oh, you also want Message Delivery Receipts (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html), not just Stream Management (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html)
I agree with you, XEPs fragmentation is a huge mess. I'd love to see more cohesive development around that specific point instead of just discussion about the technical parts of a XEP.
Yeah that's true. But psi+ on desktop and conversations on Android work pretty good.
> multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history
I am running a prosody server, and those extensions work very well with the mentioned clients.
0.9 Works
As far as I understand this means that a service restart (or a crash) wipes your archive and I assume you won't be able to migrate your archive between versions either?
- Every server support different extensions. Extreemly fragmented.
- No reliable file transfer
- No reliable cross device sync
- Almost all clients are junky
- OTR and GPG are not the best crypto, but more trusted one as it is old and simple. Axolotl Ratchet beat them in every part.
This problems lead us to make messaging (actor.im) from scratch.
Easily resettable IDs
Yes, we have desktop applications: https://actorapp.ghost.io/desktop-apps-updated/
Sorry, we are not advertising it on our landing page, we are a small team and not paying enough attention to marketing yet.
We are selling services around actor and enterprise solutions, yes.