• Wow, as someone who has been hosting XMPP for family for 10+ years and only liking it, I’m amazed by the overwhelmingly supportive comments for it, it’s like people are recovering from a Matrix hangover and rediscovering the things they already had for their merit. So yeah that’s my +1: XMPP is really something dependable, it just works, and the sysadmin story is great too (my preference goes to ejabberd for the best “turnkey” experience, but you can’t go wrong with prosody either if you are willing to read some guide).

  • it’s really not reliable especially for non techies. plus it’s a real p2p so…

    just setup XMPP

  • It’s 2026… Why do people insist on skipping the fact that XMPP exists?

    Anyway. Just set up XMPP.

    • 17 days

      Why does nobody like matrix? I get setup maybe used to be hard but I personally used ansible playbook and its really noob friendly and simple

      • @Arda @lambalicious because the experience is truly garbage. Not only does it not scale and is slow (I stopped running a server years ago, but the resources it consumed was obnoxious), but the clients often do silly things like say they’re waiting for a key refresh so it can’t decrypt the message yet. I still have to use it for work unfortunately.

        • 16 days

          I only host for my family and me otherwise use public servers, for that my server never consumed much resources at all and I never ran into these key issues people mention. I’ve been hosting it for 6 months. Idk despite it all Matrix just checks all the correct boxes is it not worth using even with the issues you had?

        • Basically yes. Matrix is in the unfortunate position of being a “nu-protocol”, something that should be good but it is intentionally designed to be bloated and wasteful just so that we (or really, techbros) can have a shiny new toy, instead of using proven, battle-tested technologies and standards that can run in a potato which is all we’ll have access to with how the RAM factories are going.

    • XMPP died along side XML. Outside of a few greybeards no one really uses it. I’m not sure why Lemmy seems to be so obsessed with a dead technology

      • xml dead

        ¿Really? Someone tell that to LibreOffice, they keep using it for their ISO approved file format!

  • 19 days

    I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

    I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

    I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

    • 19 days

      It sounds good but in practice it doesn’t work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The “best” solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses “Movim” which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.

      I use DeltaChat with friends and there’s a lot of things you can’t do because it’s essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you’re looking for is a Signal replacement it’s great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.

      I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.

      • I like matrix too but am dealing with weird […] issues

        The quintessential Matrix experience

      • 19 days

        Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

        I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

        edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

        • 19 days

          IRC supports TLS encryption. Many large networks don’t actually have it enabled or use self-signed certs because they still think it’s the 1990’s, but if you make your own server you can use TLS just fine.

          • 19 days

            IRC is great. The challenge is picking a client for the family, and getting them set up. It’s not friction free.

        • Not only does XMPP support encryption, it does the same double ratchet encryption scheme which signal uses.

        • neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive

          I run XMPP - just wanted to say that all major XMPP clients (the ones I’m thinking of are Conversations, Monal, Dino and Gajim, among others) encrypt-by-default, you have to actively go out of your way to disable it per contact.

          • 19 days

            That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

  • 19 days

    I was never able to get it to work reliably. For those mentioning XMPP, Jami uses a serverless approach with a distributed hash table instead. In principle it has better privacy but in reality it’s flaky. IDK for sure if the flakiness comes from the DHT but either way I gave up. I might try again sometime.

  • Quick question after you found happiness using IRC: was xmpp not enough ? I’m genuinely curious in case I need something like this

    • 17 days

      XMPP is not good. The clients are poor. The core server requires a bunch of extensions to do basic stuff like sync history with clients. I have my gripes with Matrix but I ran right back to it after trying xmpp for a month. Yes I tried the distros etc etc, the stack is too old and people aren’t modernizing it.

      I don’t understand why people keep bringing it up as if it is a viable modern replacement for Matrix, it isn’t.

      • Yeah I’m using motd as well and it’s the best one, I only wish it wasn’t made with AI…

  • I never tried deploying Jami, as I settled on XMPP for this use-case. But, let us know how it goes if you do try it! I haven’t seen many review it before so I’d be interested to hear your experience.

      • Ahhh, sorry to hear it :(

        I should have play with dollies as a kid instead of computers

        Probably we’d all be happier :)

        So, that probably means I will try Jami again one more time and then just switch to Snikket.

        Good luck! I hope it goes well