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Comment by astro1 | Hacker News Reader

We've had this with XMPP already.

Oh, but people don't like XML.

XML means xmpp is awful apparently. I feel pretty alone in having a bad experience with matrix, but a good one with xmpp+omemo.

I found XMPP an absolute delight to work with and built all kinds of command-and-control messaging utils with it that allowed me the flexibility to use it as a chat service and RPC broker all at the same time, with bots as APIs. It was nuts but brilliant. Bring it back, I say.

Coincidentally I just got an XMPP server going and have a bunch of people happily chatting on it. Yeah it has its issues, but it's an open, well-defined protocol evolved over a long period of time. It won't disappear if its singular maintainer disappears (referring to both Signal and Matrix here).

whoa I totally did not get the memo on omemo this sounds great

AIUI (from talking to people who had to implement XMPP), the problem isn't that "XMPP is XML", the problem is that XMPP is XML done badly. An XMPP connection is essentially a giant XML document that's never closed, which most XML libraries tend to handle very poorly, so you often end up writing your own XML library to handle XMPP. With all of the pain that entails.

SAX parsers should have no issue with that, or? So is the pain that you're forced to use SAX parsing or roll your own?

At least the SAX parsers I've used allowed to get partial "subnode DOMs", which makes it quite easy to use in practice.

That said I've only parsed ~1GB XML files (no embedded binaries), not sure if that counts as large enough.

Yup. You can write xmpp parsers with thin wrappers around a push based sax parser. It is not hard, people are just not familiar with sax.

Sure, sax parsers have their limitations, but there are sax parsers that avoid the callback trouble by doing a tree-style fold over the XML structure instead of the linear fold over the XML stream. Not for the server, since it is not super efficient, but writing a client like that is easy peasy.

yes and XMPP is actually a messaging protocol. Matrix is an eventually consistent database with a crappy messaging app implemented on top, and because of the insane architecture they are justifying decisions like message ordering that is non-deterministic[0] -- for multi user chat!

What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.

Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.

0 https://artificialworlds.net/blog/2024/12/04/message-order-i...

Even the E2EE implementation is garbage. To this day fifty percent of the conversation in every E2EE group chat I'm in is "Hey XYZ I can't see your messages because they fail to decrypt" because they still have bugs in how clients distribute their keys to other clients. Imagine the state of a chat platform literally failing at chat.

Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)

> (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)

This is not true. If it were true, it would imply you can't view any newly uploaded media from the web client. Here is the web implementation of MSC3916: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/27326

Yeah, similar but different path for bluesky, sometimes we don't really need a prefect technical solution, just something works for average user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105028

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