Techie question..
I'm currently on #matrix and have been for a couple of years. I see people talk about #xmpp. Could some one give me a quick rundown of how they compare.
boosts appreciated
I'm interested in comparinsons relating to:
app and platform support
self hosting support
ability to pay someone for hosting
encryption level
general usability for "non techie" family and friends
community/political drama
comunication types supported (text/voip/sending files, and so on)
LionelB
in reply to josefin • • •uɐıʇsɐqǝs
in reply to josefin • • •Xmpp has a long history. As matrix it is federated and you can choose Server and client and mix as you want. For self hosting there is @prosodyim - might take a good Sunday afternoon to setup. (AFAIK) the same guys work on @snikket_im which you can run in 10minutes if you have used docker compose. Resource wise Prosody runs fine on the oldest raspberry pi in your drawer. Or the cheapest 3€/month VPS.
Can't compare encryption, OMEMO works fine for me though.
Debacle
in reply to josefin • • •Both are free and federated, but #XMPP is much older (born as #Jabber in 1999) than Matrix (2014).
XMPP is an IETF standard, all extensions used nowadays are maintained by the independent @xmpp. Not sure about Matrix.
Both have multiple servers and clients. Both can be self-hosted, for both hosting services do exist. Both use very similar encryption schemes, derived from Signal.
Can't comment on Matrix, but I forced my non-tech friends and family to use Jabber.
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Debacle
in reply to Debacle • • •Community is (IMHO) very friendly and pretty diverse. Not sure about drama, though, I must have missed it.
Text chat, A/V calls, audio messages, sending files generally just work nowadays.
I use Jabber/XMPP since ≈ 2014 (first as team chat at work, than private, now also in public channels) and have no reason to migrate. But that doesn't mean Matrix were worse.
I probably forgot many aspects. I leave that to others.
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uɐıʇsɐqǝs
in reply to Debacle • • •AV calla work fine with Conversations.
Never worked on matrix for me 🤔
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to josefin • •@josefin I don't have direct experience with matrix
I self-host xmpp and I'd call it one of the easiest things to self-host: I did the original installation (years ago) using debian packages on a cheap vps and now I have to take care about it for a few minutes every now and then for general system security updates, plus once every two years for a distribution upgrade (half a day? when things go *badly*) and maybe a few hours another once per year when compliance.conversations.im tells me that I need to enable some other feature.
I know that conversations.im offers managed hosting, and I believe that there are other places, but I've never really looked into them
I'm not qualified to talk about the quality of the encryption, but with modern clients it's usually active (e2e, of course) by default
For my non-techie family members I've created an account on my server, which probably solved what I suspect could be the major hurdle, and since then they have been able to use it without significant problems. The main support I have to give them is reset their password when they change devices and have lost / forgotten it.
I'm not aware of significant drama (it may be there, but not very visible?)
It supports text and sending files. video calls is available between users of some clients, but it's not something I need, so I don't know which clients they are.
one caveat is that xmpp is *old* and there are a lot of old clients that aren't kept updated, and using those will result in a significantly worse experience. For non-techie users I solved the issue by telling them which client to use (conversations, on android), and there is a word-of-mouth list of clients that are guaranteed to be a safe choice: said conversations, gajim and dino-im on pc, and I believe monal on iThings; there are other clients that are good, if somebody wants to experiment a bit, but those are a good first choice.
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poetaster
in reply to josefin • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to poetaster • •@poetaster @josefin I am (running coturn), and I believe at least one of the users on my server is using it successfully.
Personally I don't do a lot of video calls :)
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poetaster
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to poetaster • •@poetaster I also run a jitsi server, but that one is on a different VM where I allow the jitsi packages to do whatever they want with their own prosody server, so that I don't have to deal with breakages when it updates.
This is how I've set up the actual XMPP server, instead docs.trueelena.org/self_hostin…
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poetaster
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •