I have literally never heard anyone mention xmpp outside of Lemmy. Anyways it is a dead technology due to how fragmented it is along with its reliance on XML
Comment on Self-hosting messenger infrastructure
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 17 hours ago
Self-hosted messaging was solved ago, it’s called XMPP or Jabber depending on who do you ask. There are a number of services for it, such as Prosody or ejabberd, and there are both client apps and a number of webclients.
That said you could just set up an alternative Signal client that allows for custom servers, since the centralization of Signal only really exists at the level of the client only connecting to Signal’s servers… Signal’s people have pointed this out themselves, when offering bridge setups so that people could connect from Iran or other countries where those countries blocked Signal’s endpoints.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
mjr@infosec.pub 15 hours ago
+1 for prosody. But you’ll still probably need a turnserver for calls, won’t you?
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 7 hours ago
I unfortunately wouldn’t call it solved. I host XMPP and Matrix, (and a STUN/TURN server, and a Livekit server for the modern matrix calls…), and nothing is perfect.
Prosody is really great because it’s so no-nonsense. It doesn’t hog resources or choke up like matrix servers do if you suggest to them that maybe they could deliver this text message? :3 Oh, no, it’s “hold for 2 weeks despite the recipient being online” again? Ok…
But XMPP is still incredibly hard to recommend for me, because
Hence why I still mostly use Matrix… Even though it’s such a stupid, stupid protocol.
@smiletolerantly @lambalicious "no way to read old chats on new devices,"
If you're talking about unencrypted messages, then prosody's mod_mam (https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_mam) will store messages for a configurable amount of time and allow all devices to sync older messages.
If you're talking about encrypted messages, you have two choices. OMEMO is the standard means for encrypting XMPP messages, & only works in forward mode; you can't decrypt old messages. OpenPGP, however, decrypts old msgs.
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 6 hours ago
Yes, encrypted (otherwise what’s the point? 😄). I’ll admit I haven’t tried the PGP version yet. How’s client support? For OMEMO it’s pretty lackluster, from what I’ve heard not much different for PGP?
In any case, perfect forward secrecy is definitely a good thing / strength, but I’d like a way to re-encrypt messages from an old device, just as an example, during the setup process; or a standardized way to export all history; or just something beyond “either use worse or no encryption, or loose access to your history eventually”.