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A free XMPP server powered with green energy

trashserver.net

67 pointsFunes-36 comments

Used this server a little over a year ago or so. Worked well with https://conversations.im/.

Nowadays I can't come up with any good reason to use XMPP since there's Matrix and https://riot.im/

XMPP has adapted over time to support various chat and instant messaging features that we today take for granted. These adaptions come in the form of Extensions/XEP. I remember spending two hours with a geek friend to configure something that resembles what we get from any other instant messenger today (working across multiple devices).

Meanwhile, Matrix just works. Granted, UX involved with the key management associated with E2EE was not what it should have been. But, that has largely been fixed in v1.0.

Wouldn't spend the time to get into XMPP, if I didn't already have a decent network of friends there. And yeah, there's a XMPP/Matrix bridge available if you decide to go Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/as/matrix-xmpp-bridge.html

Matrix just about replaces my need for other services like IRC and XMPP too, helped in part by the various bridges available. Plus Matrix doesn’t suffer from problems with client state like IRC and XMPP do, which is very beneficial on mobile devices or unreliable networks.

It's interesting that you compare Riot with Conversations as Conversations feels and looks much better to me (native UI) while Riot for Android always gave me the webapp feel. But Riot works consistently on all OSes while Conversations (in my opinion the best free/federated messenger to date) is available only on Android.

Riot/Android is a completely native app, but it grew pretty organically and is far from perfect. We're in the final stages of replacing it with a rewrite in Kotlin nicknamed RiotX, which should be unrecognisably better: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android.

Any such plans for Mac and iOS app too?

And any plans of design overhaul in a way that it appeals to the end user too (something people could use as an alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram) along with it being used as an IRC/Discord/Slack alternative?

Riot/iOS is already native, and works pretty well, so will likely evolve to behave more like RiotX as time goes on rather than getting rewritten.

RiotX is trying to be something that starts off feeling like WhatsApp or Telegram, but can expand into IRC/Discord/Slack for powerusers. Who knows if it'll work.

For native desktop apps, there are a bunch of other Matrix clients focused specifically on that domain - e.g. https://neilalexander.dev/seaglass and https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Fractal and https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko and https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion. Riot/iOS might expand into Riot/macOS though in future (although this is basically what Seaglass is already).

Thanks. Will check RiotX on my work Android phone and will wait for the design philosophy to move to iOS.

> https://neilalexander.dev/seaglass

This looked really good when I tried last but it was really unstable and lacking features. Will check again. PS. That link isn't working - this one does https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass

> Riot works consistently on all OSes while Conversations (in my opinion the best free/federated messenger to date) is available only on Android.

That's my point. Riot works everywhere, without configuration hell. The Android client is getting better and better.

> without configuration hell.

As long as you're a matrix.org user

if you're not a matrix.org user, you either enter your full mxid to discover your server, or manually enter your homeserver's URL in Advanced. if this isn't working, please yell...

Yelling... repeatedly, both inband and out of band. You never responded last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19865151

Manually entering homeserver URLs is a non-starter unless you're a technical user.

sorry, i missed your response on the other thread; will answer there.

Logging in with @cyphar:cyphar.com works for me. I host my own homeserver so I did have to set it up, but if you are using someone else's homeserver that is all you need to do. The homeserver and identity server information is all provided with the new .well-known/matrix/client support.

I wish there was a simple guide somewhere to install Riot on a Rpi so that I could try it out.

Are you going to elaborate in the specific nature of your issues or leave some bait like that? Riot.im should be trivially installable on most Linux systems, including the raspberry pi.

The specific nature of my issue is that there are a finite number of hours in a day.

If you go to the trouble of working on multi-year open source project it shows a lack of foresight to not include a quick install guide for one of the mostly widely sold hobbyist hardware platforms in the world.

Are you talking about the riot-web client? There are Debian packages for it, but even if you don't use those the client is all client-side JavaScript so you can statically host it. I will submit a bug report to add a quick-install guide to the README but it's quite trivial (untar into /var/www/html).

matrix-synapse does have quick install guides but a RPi is probably a bit too low spec to run a matrix server that will federate with matrix.org (though it depends strongly on what rooms you join and how many users you have).

You can download freedombox and put it on an rpi to get matrix-synapse on it. Took me an hour to get a Matrix server running which then you can use with Riot and it works perfectly.

Now if you mean to get your own local riot frontend for it, I thought there were some docker scripts that would let you do that quickly but I haven't tried those.

You mean the service that just got hacked for poor security?

Matrix is a protocol, not a "service". Chose a server you trust, or selfhost (and use E2EE).

Matrix the org was hacked.

That's like complaining the yaml.org site was defaced, so we shouldn't use yaml.

AFAIK the CI server was also compromised, so it's more serious than some website being defaced.

the CI server that was compromised was used (mainly) for running tests rather than builds. we don't believe that any builds were compromised. https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... has the full details, but yes: just because the project's infrastructure got breached doesn't mean that the protocol or wider network was affected: it wasn't.

The matrix.org infrastructure was hacked. Yes, this is obviously a problem (though their recent blog post does help restore some confidence).

But saying we shouldn't use Matrix because of this event is like saying we shouldn't use IRC because Freenode was hacked. Or we shouldn't use XMPP because HipChat was hacked. Not to mention that Matrix has sane E2EE support so folks who were using it didn't have to worry about their conversations being broken (and E2EE-by-default for Matrix is on the horizon).

>I remember spending two hours with a geek friend to configure something that resembles what we get from any other instant messenger today (working across multiple devices).

Kind of like complaining that email is too complicated because it took a long time to set someone up. XMPP is a protocol. You would have to provide more context to let us understand why the use of XMPP extensions was a pain.

I'd love to know more about how the server is run on exclusively green energy.

in Germany it is possible to buy electricity from utilities who have just renewables in their energy mix

Strangely enough, there's the same sort of renewables-only electricity choices in oil-obsessed Alberta, Canada. The city of Calgary's rail transit system runs solely on electricity purchased from wind farms.

Discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068772

Reply on news.ycombinator.com