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I am thinking of setting up a chat service for personal and growing to a small community of people. I was leaning on either XMPP or Matrix? What does /lain/ think? Which would you use and why?

>>19894 Allow me to parrot baldo trust fund kid here: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ All-in-all, Matrix strikes me as less slackful.

>>19894 XMPP's got less bagage and has much more wide client support… but if any protocol's gonna win normal people over it's probably Matrix. So I'd personally err towards Matrix, since it's the higher praxis.

>>19894 Use IRC if you want it to be easy to join to.

>>19895 Wait what makes you think Luke is a trust fund kid? It seems like he kind half bought half inherited his house in the boonies, but that's not the same as having a trust fund.

Use XMPP or IRC. Don't use Matrix it is unironically a large Mossad controlled honeypot.

I set up a matrix server at some point for myself and some of my friends. Synapse at the time was (and still probably is) a massive resource hog, so we moved to another server written in rust, because I know rust so it was easy to modify to add some customized features. We found out that this server had a security vulnerability that caused all users passwords to be stored in plaintext. I didn't know enough about the matrix protocol to fix it myself, so I just deleted the db table they were stored in, since we werent using it, and waited for a fix. It didn't come for several MONTHS. So for MONTHS people were using this software that was just leaking their passwords in plaintext. We also wanted sharable stickers like telegram. This, to my knowledge, has still not been implemented in matrix. To get stickers in matrix you have to use something called an "integration manager," the name of which alone is enough to turn me off from it. So I go onto the issue tracker on github to figure out what the hell they're doing, because surely displaying png files is not that hard, and I see them jannying people for "off topic discussion" when they expressed their frustration. This was right after I looked up the matrix people and found out they got like a $10,000,000 grant to work on their soykaf. Element, the primary matrix client, is an electron application, so it runs in a soykafty little chromium VM. This is annoying because when someone sends a video or image file, I would like to be able to view it in my video viewer or audio program or image viewer or whatever. So it's just bad design, compared to xmpp clients, like gajim, that just use my systems native programs. So with $10,000,000 they couldnt make a reasonably usable chat program. After this, they actually dropped the sticker support from the wishlist, saying "maybe someday," and then they started working on adding protocol level pronouns, instead of just having a general user biography or vcard. So we moved to xmpp. It's old, the software is buggy because nobody works on it anymore, but its comfy, its easily extensible, and it doesn't try to make me give it my pronouns.

Tox. Both your claims are meh-tier and unnecessary-annoyance setup level. Tox just werks. >has appimage >has everything >even CLI >super simple https://tox.chat https://qtox.github.io

>>20850 >Matrix is a honeypot Do you have any proof?

they're honestly both fuarrrking soykaf for different reasons. every single one of XMPP's clients is dogshit and missing a bunch of features; the only one I can think of that is pretty feature complete and usable is Conversations, which is an android app. but every other one I've tried is like kicking dead whales down the beach ass. but XMPP does have a much better ecosystem of servers, including ejabberd, which is pretty good and written in erlang. it wouldn't be the end of the world if XMPP at least had documentation that was easier to understand, but I just can't make any sense of how the fuarrrk one would implement a XEP. Matrix on the other hand guarantees that the problem XMPP has of fragmentation doesn't happen by instead having a single monolithic spec that everyone has to conform to, which makes it nearly impossible for anyone besides the team that develops Matrix (or a similarly large and well funded organization) to ever have a fully compliant client/server. Element is like kicking dead whales down the beach and always has since it was Riot, not just because of Electron although that's a big part of it (it's not even packaged on FreeBSD ffs). there are however more clients for Matrix than XMPP that are pretty decently good even if almost all of them aren't spec-compliant (gomuks is actually a pretty nice terminal chat client). however, the only server Matrix has that you can realistically use is Synapse, which is an absolute pile of fuarrrking python garbage and I hate it. there honestly aren't any good chat apps/protocols out there imo. they all suck in different ways. even Tox as someone else mentioned itt is like kicking dead whales down the beach because it doesn't have the ability to sync your account across devices and has a pretty major security vuln (https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426). does tox even have group chats? I haven't used it in years. >>20850 stop reading Luke Smith's blog

>>20865 I'm waiting for the day we can finally get a client with proper support for MIX. I feel like almost all of the issues with xmpp clients come from the MUC spec being very mucky and poorly implemented. I rarely have issues with one on one chats, its always groupchats that are buggy. But yeah, you would figure after doing instant messaging for 50 years we'd have a better protocol by now. It's really sad that matrix is supposedly the best we could come up with.

I think XMPP should introduce multiple channels per server like Discord does. I mean, even IRC kinda does that. That's probably the feature that I feel missing the most on XMPP. Personally I'm also not sure how to do voice chats on XMPP, but there is Mumble for that.

>>20865 >every single one of XMPP's clients is dogshit worst part of XMPP. once you start fuarrrking with the OMEMO plugins sometimes the clients can't even communicate anymore

>>20870 I've only ever used XMPP for direct messages but the impression I had gotten when trying to set up ejabberd is that the implementation of it is kind of dated. it's weird that you need to have a separate domain to have a MUC, for instance. I've come around personally to the opinion that IRC is basically the only good chat protocol. pestnet might be good too someday, I wanted to try implementing a client for it but it's beyond my current ability/knowledge. >>20871 this is a thing that gajim is currently working on and has plans to try to standardize as a XEP. I'm not sure how necessary it is and feel like discord has just normalized the idea that every single project needs to have like a dozen different channels when most of the time your attention should really only be expected to be focused on one channel. there are certain exceptions though; it's kind of awkward on IRC how big projects like freebsd have different channels labeled `freebsd-*` instead of just having their own 'server' or namespace or something. but it also works and is simple. >>20875 I could forgive this if any of them at least weren't incredibly ugly and worked decently, but there are different things about all of them that bother me. I begrudgingly use profanity because it at least doesn't pull in dbus like gajim, but it has a lot of missing XEPs and is just soykafty and complicated to use

Matrix imo is way too much of a pain in the ass to host, synapse is a huge resource hog and the alternatives just don't work. Matrix clients also suck ass, all of them. XMPP is much easier and it has one good client and that's Gajim. Customizable, native, feature rich and lightweight. Truly a joy to use, except when it breaks.

>>20861 >>has everything Except an audit.