Those silicon valley tech billionaires are businessmen who, by the looks of it, have completely fallen for their own marketing, and secluded themselves in a weird echo chamber packed with sycophants and profiteers. They are not superior beings. They have no credential nor academic status enabling them to speak as authorities worth being listened to. Anyone with a critical mind and access to scientific literature understands better than them the actual challenges behind “uploading one’s brain to the cloud” and can debunk that science fictionesque bullshit.
All there is to this is a bunch of aging megalomaniacs with too much power, except over death, and that scares the crap out of them and makes them say some stupid shit. And I hate that we sanewash this just because they are rich and influential. As a society we should kick them back to where they belong, which is a court of law, for their continued effort in dismantling our society.
Just below you’ll find a section about “self hosting (soon)”, though you can already use it with your own XMPP account as a standalone client (no questions asked), like I do, or, optionally, with the server-side components (opensource prosody module).
Edit: adding https://github.com/prose-im
See my other comment: if you already have an XMPP account, prose is just another client that you can use however you like, for free (and at that point, everyone should be having an XMPP account, if you ask me). If you don’t have an account, they can act as service provider (but this being a decentralized network, the don’t want to encourage hosting everyone on the same server).
It is not spam, and you miss-read it. Prose is an open-source XMPP client. They can set you up (host on your behalf) for free, up to a certain point. You can pay for it (there is a commercial offering), or you can use it unlimited and with no extra costs than your own server’s if you self-host. It’s all being developed there in the open in case you don’t want to take my word for it: https://github.com/prose-im
In terms of tech and implementation details, it’s been years since everyone has been converging towards the same WebRTC architecture (with everyone bundling/linking the same set of basic components and libs as found in chrome, android, …). As such, a call between two participants (or as a group with less than a dozen participants) should be as good on XMPP as anywhere else (including the commercial options like Google Meet, Zoom, Matrix, …).
spoiler
Of course there are caveats like relying on TURN where direct connection is impossible, but that’s the gist of it. Regarding XMPP group calls,
Where things start getting spicier is in large group calls (dozens of participants or more) requiring the stream to be brokered by a central server (SFU), with stream re-compression and optimisation. Standard-XMPP isn’t great for that yet (non-standard XMPP, like Jitsi, on which it is based, is pretty damn good, but unavailable from your regular XMPP setup). Work is going on to improve that (on two fronts, with some XMPP servers turning into SFUs, and with a protocol being designed for offloading AV streams to any willing existing SFU).
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The problem with large group calls essentially boils down to how much bandwidth and CPU you want to throw at it, and that’s not cheap (unless, of course, you are the product, i.e. Google Meet, Discord & al). The same applies to self-hosted Matrix/Galene/Jitsi: you probably won’t want to hold a large conference call on a home-server, and the server admins are bearing some costs, so get to know them and how sustainable that is. In the case of Matrix.org, it is not.
No idea what prose is.
Prose is an open-source XMPP client with a focus on large rooms/banquet-style conversations (like IRC, slack, …). It is still in its early stages but already quite usable and possibly a good fit for a subset of Skype refugees.
None of those (except Jitsi to a small extent) qualify as replacements if we ever want to evolve out of the silos we let megalomaniac CEOs build to better control us. So I’ll add to the list: prose.org , movim.eu (or anything based on XMPP) and matrix.org (though this one is rapidly falling into obsolescence). The keyword here is federation.
It has already started. Microsoft and Google hiking prices with AI bundled in is both a way to inflate the “demand” artificially, keeping the show going (covering up the fact that nobody really wants that, and even less so wants to pay a premium for it: there just is no miracle AI product/application to sell), and to mitigate some of the absurd imminent losses.
You wouldn’t see that in an “optimistic” and sound market.
with no user benefits for this extra complexity,
This is not true. One of the benefits I’ve enjoyed greatly is being able to point a group of non-techies at a URL and have them up and running […]
I was talking about the protocol’s complexity, Matrix is indeed notorious for that (you can lookup “Matrix state resolution” if you want to know more). That’s not removing anything from the good work they’ve accomplished on the client-side, which you’ve highlighted, but just to be fair to XMPP, that’s not unique to Matrix and you can find something comparable e.g. here: https://jabberfr.org/
with only a single entity […] being in charge
Also not true.
It’s true and easily verifiable in practice, just check-out who’s doing the work, who’s operating the network (still very centralized), who’s operating the gateways/bridges, and where the finances are going. Being an open protocol is a good start, but more important is how diverse is the ecosystem of client and server implementations and actors, and although the client-side has seen some diversification in the recent years, it’s still very much an issue. New Vector Ltd is failing in one area, and now tens of thousands of users are disconnected from thousands of rooms. Now, compare that with the XMPP ecosystem, and the dozens of companies, individuals and NGOs contributing/sponsoring and authoring the protocol and its implementations.
There is no single client or server.
There is only one client that’s fully featured, and it’s element, there’s only one server that’s mature and that’s synapse, none are fully spec-compliant, both are maintained by New Vector Ltd. You don’t encounter such a rift between “the reference client” vs “the rest” in the XMPP world, and you don’t see situations where the spec is updated “best-effort” from the implementation.
but it’s a niche within a niche. It doesn’t address the problems that Matrix solves.
What do you think are the problems that Matrix solve, essentially?
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It won’t ever become a “messenger for the masses”, it’s just not that good compared to WhatsApp and Messenger.
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It won’t ever become the reference “open-source, open-protocol” messenger, Signal is there to stay.
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Remains the niche of “the messenger that I self-host because I can” which is shared with XMPP.
In this regard, Matrix is much harder and costlier to run. It addresses the same problem space with more overhead and complexity, which costs them in terms of diversity of implementation and resilience. When I wrote earlier about large users dropping them, I had in mind the French government which cut their losses and stopped subsidizing New Vector Ltd, while much larger XMPP instances comfortably run millions of users privately and quietly (in things like online games).
I also have in mind the upcoming “Matrix 2.0” shake-up, which is the 3rd or 4th reboot of the Matrix protocol. It has a good chance of being the last one, though, because the new design basically starts from the realization that “the protocol is too complex, the client can’t efficiently deal with that on the user’s device, so clients will now run remotely, and a dumb frontend will connect to the proxy”. So, expect even greater self-hosting costs and marginalization.
What bothers me is that similar “words of caution” can be had about Matrix: it established itself in the same niche as XMPP, but with a much more convoluted and resource intensive protocol (that many already gave up on hosting at scale due to creeping costs and complexity), with no user benefits for this extra complexity, and with only a single entity (consistently experiencing financing challenges having measurable impacts on the quality of the product) being in charge of developing both the client and the server. That’s some big red flags.
I don’t believe Matrix to have any edge over XMPP nor any characteristics to make it more successful where XMPP isn’t. It is definitely not learning from XMPP’s history and consistently repeating the same mistakes. And this is written as someone who was an early XMPP adopter around the turn of the millennium, moved on, and while learning about it, wanted to love Matrix thinking it could be “XMPP, modern, reborn, without the boomer etiquette”. Turns out current XMPP is just that and Matrix isn’t, and I am happy to self-host XMPP accounts for a few hundred people, family and friends and to no longer have to do it with Matrix.
Interesting, but I got past that hurdle…
I was thinking more of the “day to day admin” side of things rather than “getting it running for the first time”: ejabberd really runs like clockwork, demands no effort, no attention, packs all the features you need, and uses close to no resource.
By that time, I’ve been hosting services for communities for decades, and a good argument in favour of keeping XMPP, no matter how much adoption it would eventually get was that ejabberd is one of most “fire & forget” software I’ve ever deployed. Right now I have an instance running with 500 users and it barely ticks above 150MB RSS.
In comparison to that, synapse for a dozen users, especially in the early days, was a burning hot mess. The whole stack is rather fragile and I was always worried about something breaking up, or resources going wild. If you are solo admin with users across timezones depending on you, that might matter a lot.
You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.
Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).
Absolutely, and an argument can be made about captive ecosystems controlling both clients and servers. They also represent a single point of failure, so there’s no magic bullet. In practice it’s also not that different than keeping up with your browser’s/OS’/phone’s updates and XMPP has that for itself that it has (unlike Matrix) a vibrant community of clients and servers supported by diverse parties (commercial and not).
No privacy nightmares compared to WhatsApp
My whole point was that between Signal and WhatsApp, none is intrinsically better than the other in this regard. Both are centralized and collect the same amount of privacy-sensitive data about you (your online presence and patterns, your IP, your network graph, the routing of your messages and their nature…), because they need that to function. Whether they log it (irrespective of what they advertise) is one thing nobody but themselves can verify and where opensource plays no role.
Matrix/XMPP are only better because you can self-host if you trust no one, or choose whom to trust, or change whom to trust along the way without incurring a total loss of your contacts, histories, assets, …
IMO, the sales pitch for XMPP/Matrix shouldn’t be “we are better/more secure/more privacy focused by design” (and it’s pretty clear that the tech-illiterate majority doesn’t care anyway), it should be “with us, you will no longer have to jump ship every 5 years in avg. because facebook/google/amazon/some oligarch/… broke their promise/used their absolute power over your account to their discretion”.
I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.
Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I’d say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.
It XMPP better for group VC?
I’d say “it depends”. Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn’t require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won’t go beyond a handful of attendees that way).
I’d rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been a dumpster fire in an “almost ready, trust me bro” state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that’s mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.
It appears as a tooltip
Anyhow, where I intended to draw your intention was on https://prose.org/downloads
You can just download the client for your platform (assuming one is available), or use the web one (otherwise), or just build one from the sources I linked (which is what I do), and login with your usual XMPP account. Would you need an account and have to decide which provider to register with, this would come handy: https://providers.xmpp.net/
In this set-up, prose.org isn’t hosting your account and will of course let you interact with thousands of users or more, like any other XMPP client.