Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

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I was running a prosody instance for a while. I have a 'Programming Jabber' book from O'Reilly sitting in the shelf next to me. I am (was?) a xmpp fan.

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.

I agree client quality is not perfect, however XMPP can do a lot of things with the proper extensions. Daniel Gultsch (dev of the Android 'Conversations' client [0]) held an interesting talk [1] in 2015 on modernizing XMPP. He explains a the issues XMPP has/had and how they fixed them. He also covers problems that still exist (or existed at the time) and possible solutions. Highly recommend watching it.

0: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

1: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challeng...

Thank you for the link, I'm watching the video while I write this message.

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.

I'm using Prosody 0.10 with MAM and carbons with Gajim on Linux and Conversations on Android. Working fine.

> (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages)

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.

> clients are wildly varying in quality.

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.

Can you look at my other comment in this thread about MAM seemingly not being available for prosody < 0.10? What did I misunderstand? Is the documentation unclear, can you clarify the situation? Or .. are you running a 0.10 snapshot?

I run 0.9, and the documentation says

   0.9  Works

and indeed it does (I am using it with the default storage backend).

Based on your statement I asked in the (excellent, friendly) prosody chat room. So, that mod_mam works for 0.9 because (from the mod_mam documentation) 'If no archive-capable storage backend can be opened then an in-memory one will be used as fallback.'

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?

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