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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works. And it is champion by default, which is kind of the point here. All other popular systems and servers went defunct; it will never be taken over by BigCo and left to rot. Here's to 25 more years!

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> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.

Except no.

You can't even have a conversation between Conversations and Fluux because OMEMO is enabled by default in Conversations and there is just no OMEMO support in Fluux - despite it being actually modern one.

Gajim works but Pidgin doesn't even show "I sent you an OMEMO encrypted message but your client doesn’t seem to support that". Just like images, which is a first party in Telegram and even WhatsApp.

So much for 'just works'.

And of course most XMPP clients which support OMEMO only support an old version of it, which is incompatible with the new OMEMO version, currently only supported by KDE’s own client—Kaidan. That also happens to be the only desktop client I feel like I’d actually enjoy using (if only I could use it to talk with people not using Kaidan).

FWIW Converse.js and Dino also support the latest OMEMO.

Oh, nice! It looks like Converse.js has added it just two months ago, but I haven’t been able to find anything for Dino (only complaints about as old as the latest release, about the newest OMEMO not being supported). Was it shipped very silently, or are they perhaps planning to add it in an upcoming release?

Looks like I might have been wrong about Dino, sorry about that.

I worked on adding OMEMO2 support to Converse.js via libomemo.js and I tested it against Kaidan.

Libervia (on which I'm working) does support OMEMO:2 (it was actually the first client to implement it) + legacy one + OX (OpenPGP) + OX for Pubsub (so you can encrypt everything pubsub related: blog, forums, tickets, etc). ()
Anyway, there is a discovery mechanism, and clients do adapt the version used by peers, so there is no incompatibility. Kaidan choose for a while to have only OMEMO:2, because resources are limited and they were going for the latest version first, but resource are limited for everybody, and it took times for others to implement OMEMO:2 too.
NLnet/NGI did (and still does) gave financial support on several XMPP projects (including mine, huge thanks to them), and, curiously, when there is money to help, implementations happen. That's problem nb 1 with XMPP: lack of financial resource.

() GUI (notably web UI) is being reworked, not stable yet, but the CLI is pretty solid.

Fluux is brand new and 100% vibecoded, so not surprising if it has some rough edges.

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works

My limited experience is that it's not the case. When I tried to join a few rooms I got insulted because my client apparently used extensions that weren't supported by some XMPP enthusiasts' clients, so my client sucked and I had to change it and use an ugly one instead.

I'd rather get a feature-complete protocol than an extensible one, so that at least everyone can speak the same

That sounds like a problem with some assholes, not a problem with your software. I'm sorry assholes happened to you

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.

Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.

What do you mean? You have to accept a friend request before someone can message you. It's more spam-resistant than email, not less. That said, I don't know if there's anything that prevents spamming friend requests.

And how am I going to find the valid friend requests under the hundreds of spam ones? I used it just like a chat version of public email, for bug reports and such, so I don't know who is going to message me beforehand.

Fair enough. I've only ever used XMPP when Google chat used it and at work in the days before Slack.

You can mediate friends requests by having servers generate an invite link, you can generate QR codes your friend can scan on a side channel, ... There are ways

Or you can just show the welcome message from a new contact, just like anyone else does. Adding a 2nd factor here is the reason XMPP suck.

I think that's a symptom of the provider you chose, not the XMPP sphere itself. I've used Jabber/XMPP for just over 15 years and while I've seen plenty of bullshit going on in various highly popular MUCs (join-floods, phishing attempts and such) I've never personally been subjected to spam directed at me.

I have joined XMPP rooms via Matrix and have already gotten spam from XMPP this way

Which is surprising since XMPP allows you to hide your global address in public rooms and Matrix doesn't (unless they fixed it by now?).

I regularly use IRC, XMPP, and Matrix. I think your description fits IRC better. XMPP kinda has a Plan 9 or Amiga type of vibe, cult following "ahead of its time", but never took off totally how people hoped, or didn't stay relevant at least.

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.

No. It doesn't "just work". It very much depends on which subset of the XEPs all the parties in the chain support.

> All other popular systems and servers went defunct;

Well, in this sense it does just work :)

You can always send and receive messages no matter what XEPs are supported. Not that that is a problem in practice. There is a fairly well established subset of XEPs that everyone supports.

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html

https://compliance.conversations.im/

Unless you want to encrypt said messages. But I guess insecure communication beats no communication at all. (I also never had much luck with voice and video calls using XMPP.)

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