So self-hosting federated instances like this is pretty interesting way to scale.
> But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one.
Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?
Also if we go down this road, we’re all depending on our internet access provider at the very least too! At some point we gotta know when to stop trying to be fully independent from the rest of the world. He chose there.
That would certainly be a very annoying event, but not an unrecoverable one.
Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.
Sad because the idea of running a federated chat service for your family and them having all their contacts there, is great from a data ownership point of view.
Went back to use a mix of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger because apparently there is always some people not wanting to use one or the other service, or only using one of them.
WhatsApp OTOH still is a fork of XMPP.
Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat
This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?
XMPP puts complexity in extensions (XEPs). The core protocol is simple but you need to cherry-pick which XEPs your server and clients support, leading to fragmentation. Two XMPP clients might support completely different feature sets.
Matrix puts complexity in the protocol itself - the DAG-based event graph for federation is elegant but expensive. Synapse eating your VPS is the direct consequence of that design choice. Every room maintains a full causal history, which is great for consistency guarantees but terrible for resource usage.
The ejabberd comment in this thread is telling - "just works, takes close to no resources, needs almost no maintenance" for almost a decade. That's the XMPP experience when you accept the tradeoffs.
I think we ditched XMPP not because Matrix was technically better, but because Matrix arrived with a better story at the right time: a single reference client (Element) that actually worked, a clear spec (not 400+ optional XEPs), and federation that felt more like email than like "hope your server supports the same extensions."
The irony is that both protocols now face the same existential problem: your contacts won't switch. The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design.
This is of course true of Matrix as well. Just because you document everything in one place doesn't mean every app will support it all. Or that every app will even want to support it all. If every app were exactly the same there would be no point in having multiple apps, after all.
> The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design.
Absolutely.
Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.
We didn't. It was never very popular, and is today more popular that it has ever been.
I haven’t had a reason to use an xmpp client in over a decade.
Also plugin for gif selector.
But other than that, my ejabberd instance has been running for years with no effort.
I've been using Dino on Linux to talk to Conversations/Monal with video and it's been working pretty well. Do you have a different experience ?
The only caveat I have not been able to solve is hosting an xmpp server for a different domain, like it's possible with email.
A client connecting the account joe.doe@example.ORG will find the server it wants to connect to via SRV to be , e.g., xmpp14.example.COM and expect a TLS certificate for "example.ORG" which that server does not have (nor can/should easily get) - which makes sense in a lot of ways, but limits the ways one can offer hosting services.
If anyone has creative solutions I'm all ears.
> I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop.
You can run a Signal-XMPP gateway. See https://slidge.im/
This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client. Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust OMEMO (we all have our own threat models), but OMEMO and Signal have fewer similarities that people often assume and has some important caveats [0].
skerit•1h ago
Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker)
Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo.
So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.
Arathorn•1h ago
simgt•15m ago