XMPP

My primary home is in XMPP for Reasons, but it would occasionally be useful to DM someone in Matrix.

I know there are bridges, through aria-net if I remember correctly, and I know encryption is impossible through a bridge. Aside from encryption, is connection seamless or is it glitchy, and if the latter, are we talking occasional nuisance or Cone of Silence?

This release brings long awaited support for message replies and message reactions. 👍

Message Moderation has been improved as well.

Say hello to voice messages! 📣

I just discovered it’s possible to edit the last msg that was sent over XMPP.

Dino

Has the capability. But it does not give you a record of past versions. It would be useful if Dino would still show you your past versions because you cannot know if the other party saw the uncorrected version. So you should have a record of those erroneous payloads.

Profanity

Has the capability. But it cannot correct a msg that you composed in another client. That may be a protocol limitation. Maybe they don’t want the complexity of having edited versions signed by a different key.

Strangely, Profanity only updates the display if an inbound correction (e.g. from Dino) is minor. Dramatic edits in Dino seem to be ignored by Profanity. Also strange that when Profanity accepts an inbound update from Dino, the existing msg text is updated. One might expect text in a TUI to not be altered in place. It’s an IRC-like interface.

Snikket

Does not have the capability of making corrections. But it fully accepts inbound alterations no matter how dramatic the change is.

I'm exploriing the idea that would be the "reverse" of Libervia: an offline-first AcitivityPub application that keeps all information in the client and only relies on the server to be the receiver of the inbox messages. To make sure that the client can synchronize properly, I am considering two approaches:

1. The server and the client need to use the same database which has a replication protocol (like CouchDB/PouchDB)
2. The server receives the messages in the inbox via HTTP, but relays to the client via XMPP.

The first idea simplifies things a bit, but forces the client to use a specific tech stack. I'm also not sure if the server needs to have everything replicated, just the messages that the device haven't seen yet.

I'd also be interested in something like MUC, because I would use to let the server use rooms for things like Mastodon's "follow tags".

Lastly, because I'm planning to do this as a browser extension, it would have to be something that runs on the browser. xmpp.js seems like a good candidate (lots of contributors and reasonably well documented), but the last commit was from two years ago. Is it still being used/maintained? If not, is there any other recommendation?

Had a quick look at Poezio and Libervia while I’ve been using Profanity for a couple years now.

Libervia

• OMEMO is integrated. OMEMO is important enough that it should be a highlighted feature when looking at the pkg description (apt show libervia-backend) not something we dig for.
• It tries to be everything, like having games. That broad focus is a bit worrying because so many comms apps screw up at just exchanging e2ee messages that you really don’t want other things competing for maintenance effort. But OTOH it could be quite useful that the backend can interface with a mail client like mutt. And has an activitypub gateway which could have some interesting obscure uses.
• Docs are in a quite bad state. Man page references broken URLs and the websites that are up point to other broken links. The page with content is https://goffi.org/ and it’s got some bizarre problem where it tries to refresh the screen every few seconds. Really hard to read when it keeps refreshing. /usr/share/docs/libervia-* is also useless. References to broken URLs there too as well as mentions of non-existent files. Docs say to run the daemon you need to execute eval [tic]dbus-launch --sh-syntax[tic], which is baffling as it does not actually refer to the libervia backend. There must be more to it than that.
• Man page makes no mention of a proxy option.
• It’s a good design to have a backend and different frontends that can connect to it, generally, but the lack of proxy option complicates that. If the backend has to run on torsocks, will the frontends be able to connect to it locally?

Poezio

• Well packaged and documented. /usr/share/docs includes an HTML tree of well presented docs. Really seems well organised.
• Bit alarming and unconventional that when you launch it that it automatically connects to servers even if you never supply a server to connect to. Security feels like an after-thought. I had to run it in a firejail sandbox first just to make sure it generated the config file that I could modify before putting it to use. Docs say the connection it tries to make is “anonymous”, but they use that term overly loosely. There is no mention of Tor. I want to be in control of what connections are made and it’s a bit off that a sandbox is needed to force it to run offline.
• There is no proxy config option. So unless it looks at undocumented env vars, it should be run on Torsocks.
• OMEMO is not built-in. There is a separate OMEMO plugin out in the wild, not packaged on Debian. That’s not ideal for Debian users because we have to wonder what quality standards did the plugin not satisfy, and the fact that upgrades can break part of the pkg when only part of the tool chain is in the official repos.

So I think these two apps need to evolve more. Profanity has issues but it seems I’m better off trying to struggle through those.

PGP email in the 1990s was so much more reliable and usable. It’s bizarre how in 2024 e2ee comms have become such a shit show. Most people are using tech giants and not encrypting, which is exactly what the tech giants want. I will not, so I’m out of reach to most people. I won’t touch Signal either because that’s garbage. Maybe Delta chat is worth a look since it claims to do PGP over email in a way that normies can deal with.

“Profanity” is an XMPP app. (For those who got the wrong idea about the title)

What I use:

• Debian with Profanity (preferred for the proper keyboard and TUI)
• Android with Snikket

What my low-tech comrades use:

• iOS with Snikket

It’s a bit of a disaster. One iOS-Snikket user gets my msgs but never a notification. Another iOS-Snikket user is plagued with that error msg (some bogus msg about OMEMO being unsupported). My comrades are at the edge of sanity since I’m the one who imposed xmpp+omemo on them, and they have little tolerance for all the problems.

I’m not sure what to try next. I would hate to replace Profanity because it’s the only decent text based option with official debian support. Would it help if the iOS users switch from Snikket to Monocles?

I have Dino 0.4 on Ubuntu. Whenever I upgrade anything in flatpak, it tells me that Dino is using a GNOME 44 runtime and that it’s out of support.

Is Dino under active development, and I should just hold tight? Or should I be looking for a different XMPP client?

Hi !

As I have account on lemmy.ml, I look into the lemmy community created on slrpnk.net through the federated lemmy community, but its contents don't match the ones on the original slrpnk community. There are some messages missing.

Not sure if this is something someone would care, but I was planning to look at the contents through the lemmy instance, where I do have my account...

Greetings !

Hello. My friend and I have some problem with decryption messages. Sometimes we receive "Message was encrypted with OMEMO but could not be decrypted" instead of the message itself. What could this problem be related to?

It is written in Rust, based on xmpp-rs and Dioxus.

This is quite a big one, as it required significant changes in the underlaying data-storage and will finally allow not only replies but also reactions etc. to be displayed in Gajim.