Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?
I’ve personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can’t read it. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.
XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It’s currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.
It’s still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.
But what it can do already is:
- Excellent text chats, including with very good optional encryption
- Group voice/video calls with screensharing (must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app’s audio)
- A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
- a built-in paint program to draw stuff to input into the chat
- Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end
This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don’t understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn’t deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.
XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.
stop the disinformation, thanks
https://lemmy.ca/comment/21700498deleted by creator
I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly,
Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.
it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to,
When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.
I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.
I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately.
I am, mainly due to the Discord situation which has resulted in much more interest in alternative platforms. After everything dies down and everyone is settled in their new platform, I’ll likely be posting about it a bit less.
but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks
I am mentioning its drawbacks; it does not have two very important Discord features as of now, which I explicitly point out. I also pointed out that screen sharing audio only works with Chromium browsers, which is another downside (I only use Firefox myself).
while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options
You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago. I had been using it in the period you mention the problem existing in, but stopped using it due to those issues. I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it (a few months is not that long ago). I’m glad to hear that problem has been finally resolved for them. As it’s not relevant anymore, I won’t mention it when relaying my experience with it in the future.
You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago.
No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.
I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it
When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)
In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.
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Why has IRC not been mentioned? The basics of Discords UX is based on it after all.
And IRC now has web clients that can display inline images, upload them on a channel, preview URLs, push notifications, keep history, and more.
I use The Lounge but there is also Convos and a few others.
I suspect many Discord refugees will be looking for an all-in-one app that can do both solid text chat with discord-style servers and many rooms/spaces in them, as well as the ability to seamlessly have voice/video calls with groups of friends, as well as screenshare applications to watch movies together or stream games while chatting.
IRC is only capable of the text chat part, and would require an additional video conferencing app with a separate account to fulfill the video call part, which most would find off-putting after having it all-in-one for over a decade.
Matrix, and it’s not even close.
Matrix clients suck, but xmpp ones are way worse.
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound
I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.
It’s worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I’m 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.
XMPP has been the cat’s pajamas so far.
Why did you two opt for XMPP rather than Signal Messenger?
maybe the phone number requirement on signal? that would be a dealbreaker if any of them didn’t have one
It also might be a dealbreaker from a privacy perspective. It’s weird that Signal, which is supposedly the gold standard, has this requirement.
When me and my mates set this up, Signal was only available on phones, not desktops. It also required providing a phone number to a central authority, which some of us were not comfortable doing. With XMPP we got the choice of a large number of clients to pick from. Both the server and the clients were lightweight.
I just had a search maybe you can self host a Signal server, but I did not know that at the time. I wanted to self-host. So that was a reason too, but maybe (?) a false reason. The Signal self hosting situation may be murky. My brief search found some claims that the official app does not support using other servers, and you need a customized app to do it. It might be more self host-able in theory than in practice. XMPP had multiple servers to pick from, and lots of clients.
All those things could balance more toward Signal if your priorities are different, tho.
Yeah the self-hosting thing is new, its really clunky and they dont encourage you not to use it. I think (?) they may have even discontinued it.
Its odd to me that Signal is supposedly the gold standard yet it breaks all these privacy 101 rules. Such as requiring you hand over your phone number to a central authority, not really allowing you to self host, and not posting an official app on fdroid. I’ve heard that portions of its official repo are not even open source (though I haven’t verified this for myself). XMPP sounds like the better choice to be honest.
Matrix feels like fake decentralyzation: it still used in the og server for 99% of the time?
Take this with a grain of salt cause this is just what I’ve heard from a friend who knows a lot more about server hosting than I do, but from what I’ve heard hosting a Matrix homeserver is a potential legal liability unless you’re really selective about who you let on your server cause it stores the entire state of every room a user uses, so all it takes is one friend of a friend to visit a sketchy room where people have shared csam and you could be in trouble.
Assuming this is accurate and not just my friend misunderstanding something or being overly paranoid I could imagine people being very hesitant about hosting their own server rather than just using the default matrix.org server.
This is right. It actually made me wonder how likely it is on xmpp.
Because in public rooms talking about whatever android app all of a sudden you could have some rando come in and drop csam and leave. Then they propagates and Im not sure if the deletion does or not.
Real big issue IMO.
I don’t know about public servers, but that’s part of why I self host my own server for me and my mates. We all know each other, and we don’t federate the server with anything else, even though XMPP supports that. The only way for anyone to join is if i send them an invite link, so randos can’t show up.
I prefered xmpp. But either xmpp or matrix arent discord alternatives
It’s in progress
Wut
That’s a screenshot of the Movim client’s WIP of Discord-like servers w/spaces, which is being rapidly worked on.
Dang that looks really nice, finally a decent decentralized chat client!
Fluxer is currently my top contender. It’s AGPL and federation is on the roadmap.
Fluxer is a better Discord alternative than Matrix and XMPP.
That said, XMPP is more private. Matrix is worse than everything else.
fluxer can be a better alternative, but right now is isn’t
i can barely use it due to server issues and selfhosting is not an option at the moment
not trying to dismiss fluxer, just making it clear to anyone trying to use it in its current state
Fluxer, while promising, is currently too buggy for people to switch to, and still has an unproven back-end that needs to show it can scale up. I am hopeful for it though, as it uses GPL, and the dev plans to implement federation and encryption at some point.
XMPP is rapidly gaining Discord-like features thanks to the Movim client, but it too is not yet a 1:1 replacement. It is however pretty stable, and could be used while users wait for those additional features.
is movim even encrypted from what i can tell it isnt
It is. It offers OMEMO encryption of both chats and video/audio calls. It’s based on Signal’s encryption, but modified to work with a federated/decentralized model.
does it have an android app, or is it all web based
Conversations is my preferred Android client.
Conversations isn’t a Discord alternative though
Movim only offers a PWA, but there are other native Android XMPP apps, such as Monocles Chat, but it isn’t as advanced as Movim in some ways, as it’s still lacking the ability to make or receive group voice/video calls, nor can it screenshare. It is however able to make 1-on-1 calls, even with Movim users.
This sort of fragmentation is the biggest thing I dislike about XMPP. Although Matrix kind of fucked it up also when they switched mobile to Element X
I agree, it’s an unfortunate downside. But it’s still probably our best option long-term.
At least in XMPP’s case, I think a way of dealing with the fragmentation is to treat Movim as the ‘main’ app, and to encourage any friends willing to leave Discord to just use that, and not mention other options unless you know they’re a bit more tech savvy, and can understand the limitations of the other clients and just think of them as fun little bonuses (until they catch up, anyway). :)
Movim has supported OMEMO since 2021 from the looks of it.
not by default tho
can’t be, you need to setup your enc keys beforehand
yeah i hope matrix just fixes things up to make the experience smoother. seems to be taking them forever. it not being on by default is a nonstarter im not going to explain to my non tech friends how to encrypt their messages. this is basically the only real reason why signal is so great, its easy and preset out of the box. simplex seems good too and is making more progress than matrix it seems, idk how many users it can have in one chat though
signal is similar, the moment your friend loses their signal enc key and try to login again they will lose their chat history (same as matrix)
it’s a limitation due to the nature of E2EE
in my case while I care for E2EE, it is not enough to trust signal servers with my metadata and its the same for matrix. XMPP looks like a good balance between owning the server, controlling how to federate and choosing what to encrypt
A lot of clients don’t have encryption enabled by default since they’ve been around for quite a long time, before this was a primary consideration in web communication standards. In these cases, like with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.
with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.
Can confirm, it’s just a toggle, and then you can click a padlock icon in any chat to send any new messages as encrypted.
I also prefer xmpp, which I find more stable and easier to set up and maintain.
In my experience XMPP is easy to set up, lighter on resources, and the clients tend to work well across multiple platforms. We have small private and public groups using it daily with zero complaints.
Matrix tends to be more involved in setting up, and our group ran into issues where some clients weren’t working as smoothly or reliably as we needed for a primary communication platform. We also had a huge problem with traffickers of all sorts joining our rooms to spam their telegram links or CSAM. That hasn’t been a problem after more than a year on XMPP.
When you say traffickers joined your rooms to post spam, how did they find you? Is it like email where they can just try every possible email address at a particular domain or was your room posted publicly on your website or something and that’s how they found you?
The rooms we had issues with were public rooms that were discoverable via Matrix, with a couple of links on the web to direct people to them. The links to the rooms still exist in the same places, but ever since converting them to XMPP links rather than Matrix ones the traffickers have disappeared. I couldn’t tell you if that’s because XMPP is less popular with that crowd or if the tools they’re using to discover and spam them don’t work on XMPP. Either way it was a welcome change.
I haven’t found a solid answer for this…does XMPP support proper history nowadays? I remember using XMPP servers back around 2012 and if you didn’t have your client open, you just missed messages in rooms. If that’s still the case, it’s a pretty significant draw back…
It does for me, but I’m not sure whether it does in a general way, or if that’s because of some extension on the server I’m running.
I can send a message to my mates, or vice versa, and if we’re not online those will be delivered to us next time we connect. It’s been perfectly seamless.
However they have complained about multi-device support, where they want to log in sometimes from a phone and sometimes from a desktop. Apparently that is a less polished experience.
Given you propose to chose between 2 federated solutions, I assume you want a good robust federation. So it’s easy: XMPP, period.
Anyone who has experienced self-hosting knows Matrix is several times heavier on memory and CPU than XMPP, and that’s one of the reasons 99% of the Matrix users are on 1 server, while I actually dnn’t even know which XMPP server is the largest.:
I don’t know what people use discord for, honestly. I just call up my friends on signal for the regularly scheduled gaming session and play. All I need is audio.
I don’t understand what people need video or screen sharing for while gaming. Are they playing a game watching each other’s facial reactions or something? And others talk about screen sharing… Are you guys gaming while watching the other person’s screen? I’m puzzled.
Signal can audio and video calls with screen sharing 🤷
Matrix I only use for opensource projects or as a replacement or client for IRC (IRC sucks ass). There was also a time fosdem streamed everything on matrix. It was glorious. I wish more conferences (and fosdem itself) had chatrooms for every talk, rooms for different topics, and a general chat room for everybody. We don’t have to fly and waste fuel to participate in conferences. Not everybody has deep enough pockets to pay 2k for a flight to Sydney and a further 1k for food and lodging there. Or worse, a trip to the US to get fondled by US border patrol and sent to Guantanamo bay for having said “Trump is a dunce”.
Not a huge user of screensharing, but it does come up, and I’d probably miss it if I lost it. Here’s a few recent examples:
- Playing a 1v1 PVP game, such as Elden Ring or Armoured Core, taking turns with 3 players, it’s nice to be able to share POVs so that the waiting player can watch.
- Setting up for a TTRPG, it was nice to share the online character builder to more easily ask for advice on something like “which move should I take?”.
- Playing Valheim, we all died except 1, and he shared his screen so we could guide him to our bodies with the materials to build a portal for us to get back easily.
I’m certainly not sharing my screen all the time, but it comes up fairly often that something happens that you want to show the group when they can’t just look at it with you in-game. It all depends on what kinds of games you’re playing and how large a group you’re playing with.
My gaming friend group is 8 or 9 people. When you want to hang out digitally, you just jump in our discord and see who is currently playing. You jump in the channel, join the conversation. If the others are currently in a match that can’t be hot joined, someone will put on a stream for you, so you can watch and have an easier time joining the conversation.
Sometimes a friend is playing a game that you don’t own or they want to show you. Easily done with a stream. Streaming on Discord is very useful to us.
We use the webcam feature for our Tabletop Roleplaying Sessions.
One “feature” that Discord has that will be missed by our small community: Being able to see who is in a voice call without having to join it.
We have spent the last week exploring alternatives and it looks like we will be using a combination of self hosted matrix and mumble unless self hosted stoat gets voice very soon.
So Mumble for voice chat and Matrix for text chat?
Exactly.
Does your group ever use video calls and/or screen sharing?
Yes. Those are not supported in mumble. For those we’d probably pop up a jitsi session.
Matrix has voice chat. You can enable it in the element client. Settings, Labs, video voice experiment. Enable it and you can have voice and video rooms.
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Xmpp. Looks less polished, but works better, and isn’t mostly controlled by the ex-Amdocs Matrix Foundation.
