Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sweden 1985 days ago
That statement doesn't reflect the sad state of XMPP clients available nowadays.

I used to run my own XMPP server for years before moving on to Matrix and the reality was that the only good client was Conversations for Android. There wasn't a single one for Linux desktop that felt modern and up to speed with the latest XEPs.

And let's not even mention trying to get multiple clients supporting the same history with encryption enabled, that was super chaotic.

I'm really glad I abandoned my XMPP server in favor of Matrix. Matrix is modern and it just works and setting up a Synpase server is way easier than setting up a Prosody server.

1 comments

When was "nowadays"? Gajim and Dino are definitely as decent as any native apps available for Matrix.

Sorry you feel that way about Prosody. If you have specific feedback we're always looking to improve the setup experience.

Snikket (briefly mentioned in the post) is an attempt to bundle everything you need for a modern communication server into a single package (e.g. automatic certs and stuff that you need for audio /video) out of the box. Maybe it sounds like it would suit you more.

I don't feel negative towards Prosody, Prosody is an awesome project.

My criticism is about XMPP in general and its ecosystem.

I stopped my XMPP server a few years ago, Dino was still in its infancy. It's good to see that the client is reaching some maturity but then, looking at the supported XEPs I can see that MAM is not supported for group chats:

- https://github.com/dino/dino/wiki/Supported-XEPs

Fortunately Matrix and the respective clients have been evolving quite well, so I don't see the need of going back to XMPP.

I stopped my XMPP server some 7..9 years ago after seeing loads of spam in MUCs.
The fact that Gajim is the best desktop XMPP client says more about how bad desktop XMPP clients are than how good gajim is. Dino is just very recently getting good enough to use, but it seems like it will be too little, too late.

And that's without talking about the elephant in the room of iOS. 5 years ago my workplace moved from XMPP to mattermost. There was a list of features desired by people; 7/8 could have been solved by updating ejabberd and telling people to switch clients, but iOS support meant switching away.