I recently saw Alex’s video about XMPP and I got curious.
I am using Element and Schildichat a bit, trying Element X and curious about the new Development here. It seems vibrant, they rewrite stuff in rust, the Apps are fancy and all.
But I tried Conversations and it seems based too, has transparent encryption, it is damn fast, usable, supports groups and files and all. Probably doesnt use the latest fancy Android SDKs but it seems solid.
I was surprised about how fast it was, as Matrix drastically varies per server. But also I found many dead communities, and in general I dont see XMPP at all, while many Projects (if not using Discord, bruh…) have a Matrix room.
How secure is OMEMO in todays standards? Or OpenPGP, compared to Matrix or Signal Encryption? I heard it also has rotating keys and all.
There are other things, like permission systems, chosen federation, privacy, bridge support and more, that are interesting. Are there advanced modern WebUIs for XMPP you like?
I saw that it uses up waaay less resources, why is that? Really, is “simply encrypted mail” somehow worse in an important way?
Similar to IRC, where I never found nice usable apps for my taste, I thought XMPP was deprecated, but that doesnt seem so?
What can you tell me about XMPP, is it modern, secure, privacy friendly?
This is good reading on XMPP
https://privacy.awiki.org/im.html#XMPP
And one about matrix
https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
I think that XMPP is obviously the superior choice here. Matrix is funded by venture capitalists that need to make money some way and they are actually recollecting users’ data for that.
Do you have a source for the claim that collecting userdata is ultimately what funds Matrix?
have you read the article I linked?
I didn’t say it was ultimately what funds matrix, they sell servers too, but they recollect data that’s for sure.
Quoting the article here:
matrix.org and vector.im receive a lot of private, personal and identifiable data on a regular basis, or metadata that can be used to precisely identify and/or track users/server, their social graph, usage pattern and potential location. This is possible both by the default configuration values in synapse/Riot that do not promote privacy, and by specific choices made by their developers to not disclose, inform users or resolve in a timely manner several known behaviors of the software.
Data sent on a potential regular basis based on a common web/desktop+smartphone usage even with a self-hosted client and Homeserver:
The Matrix ID of users, usually including their username.
Email addresses, phone numbers of the user and their contacts.
Associations of Email, phone numbers with Matrix IDs.
Usage patterns of the user.
IP address of the user, which can give more or less precise geographical location information.
The user’s devices and system information.
The other servers that users talks to.
Room IDs, potentially identifying the Direct chat ones and the other user/server.
With default settings, they allow unrestricted, non-obfuscated public access to the following potentially personal data/info:
Matrix IDs mapped to Email addresses/phone numbers added to a user’s settings.
Every file, image, video, audio that is uploaded to the Homeserver.
Profile name and avatar of users.
I did, yes. TBH it is very anti-Matrix right out of the gate, makes a mountain out of a molehill and it even admits that it contains FUD.
There’s a couple of things that are misleading in it (for example the section on bridges) and the critique basically boils down to “if you use the identity servers that are run by Matrix.org with your self-hosted homeserver they can see the info you send to them” and “Google Analytics in Element is bad”.
All in all I didn’t find it very convincing, and very lacking in nuance.
XMPP lacks half the features of Matri, userbase is non existent, and there’s not a single good client. That’s all you need to know.
No XMPP windows client support VOIP, clients development for XMPP are almost dead, so there is no comparaison here with matrix. I wish I could use XMPP instead, but it is something to relegate to the past.
You can use Movim just fine in any browser and it has voice and video calls.
Dino also has it and it can be installed on Windows although that is still a bit experimental.
Modern standard voice calls for Gajim are (finally) being worked on as well.
Xmpp client development is far from dead. There are several very interesting new clients being developed and are in preview or should be released soon, like Moxxy and Prose.
So you wrote all of this to agree that there is no VOIP supporting windows client. despite them having been in development for more than a decade . I have personnaly checked with gajim developers about VOIP support on windows and they confirmed they are not planning on working on it. xmpp doesn’t belong to 2020(s)
Movim is a PWA app, which is basically the same if not better than the Electron wrappers that Element, Discord and all the others are using on Windows.
Client development on Windows just plain sucks, and most normal users prefer browser clients anyways.
As for Gajim: there is an external developer working modern audio calls on it since a few weeks, and it sounds quite promising so far.
XMPP is too fragmented with all the addons or whatever they’re called (edit: XEPs). Chatting with people on different servers, or even different clients is a crapshoot whether basic features like encryption are enabled. I have a lot of hope for Matrix as they work out the bugs.
Try using Matrix with a non-synapse / non-element client setup and you will have as much if not more fragmentation issues. Heck, Synapse doesn’t even follow the official Matrix standard, so things break all the time on other Matrix servers like Conduit.
XMPP had a lot more time to iron out federation issues between different implementations, and it shows.
E2e encryption works more hassle free in my experience with XMPP as well, at least for private chats and small groups.
I’m basically still ‘testing’ both of them out. Neither is good enough for me to lobby my friends to use. I use Cheogram for XMPP, mostly for it’s integration with SIP/jmp.chat. Years ago I spent a bunch of time on Movim. I’d be very happy for XMPP to be a consistent experience.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=GurbaZzwYvU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
