Dino Blog

I'm not the parent, but I use both XMPP and Matrix, and have some thoughts to both of these.

> Matrix isn't really decentralized

I think most of the concerns stem from the majority of the development in the ecosystem being driven by a single company. This manifests in a few ways:

matrix.org is by far the biggest server. Element is by far the most popular client. Both were (until recently) maintained by the same company, and the client selects matrix.org as the default server. This was done to make onboarding easier, but it centralised power into one organisation.

Theoretically, since Element does most of the development, if they want to push something into the protocol, the whole ecosystem really has to follow.

Because most people are on matrix.org, and the protocol works by replicating state between involved servers, matrix.org gets a lot of metadata even from conversations that are not hosted on their server (as long as one person in the chat is on matrix.org).

There are some flags which are enabled by default which automatically "phone home" to matrix.org even when you are running your own server. They are easy to turn off, but an annoyance for people who want to run completely separated instances.

The standard way to join a chat is via a "matrix.to" link. This leaks some information to matrix.org even if the server is completely separate.

By contrast, XMPP has no dominant player who drives most of the development, and no dominant server instance. I imagine this…

> group messages go into some archive-window (instead of showing up in the chat window like in every over program), sometimes the archive misses them...

Not sure what that even means. Worth reporting.

> pictures are a link to the server, so I have to manually download them all.

I think you need to install the image preview plugin.

For gajim make sure it's a recent version.
Dino-im https://dino.im/ is decent.
poezio https://poez.io/en/ if you want a text client.
converse.js https://conversejs.org/ for a web client.

Public server wise I don't have any recommendations (but i'm sure others have plenty) other than movim. https://movim.eu/#try they have a baked in client (and do a whole bunch of other stuff like micro blogging) but once you have a account, there is no reason you can't use any client you want.

Encryption with omemo is a issue and usability could be improved (I believe people are working on that).

Because there are too many clients with a wide range of supported/unsupported features.

The only solution out there that supports cross platform JINGLE is AstraChat[^1], which is closed source and commercial, but they lack OMEMO and Carbons.

Conversations on Android has both OMEMO and Carbons, but no audio/video or p2p transfer files.

Pidgin, Empathy, Gajim, etc are lacking behind with features, though Pidgin can be made reasonable up to date, still without JINGLE[^2].

Dino[^3] is promising, but it linux only.

I don't know how Trillian is doing these days.

[^1]: https://astrachat.com/

[^2]: https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/#adding-networks-to-pidgin-technical-details

[^3]: https://dino.im/

While I understand the concerns and I appreciate all of what Conversations' author is doing for the community, other clients have also seen significant improvements lately.

Gajim[0] has practically come back from the "dead". There is a huge difference, UI/UX-wise but not just, between pre and post 1.0, (1.1 at the time of writing, 1.2 coming).

There is also dino[1], a nice and simple desktop client, and converse.js[2], a fast-developing web-client.

Movim[3] and Salut-à-Toi[4] are also putting in a lot of work on the social network side.

[0]: https://gajim.org

[1]: https://dino.im

[2]: https://conversejs.org

[3]: https://movim.eu

[4]: https://salut-a-toi.org

Edit: Added conversejs

Thanks for the reply, I'll definitely keep an eye on all that.

> For a Slack competitor like Linen it would make more sense to use web UI because of the video calling/WebRTC stuff.

I'm not even sure it matters so much, for instance there is this XMPP client that uses (lib)WebRTC for audio/video calls and has all of its UI build with Gtk (no web): https://dino.im/

> Proper GUI toolkits give you a lot of stuff out of the box […] Also I learned GUI programming decades ago and find classical UI toolkit more intuitive than HTML.

yep, looks like we are on the same boat of angry old men yelling at clouds :)

> I would like to see an alternate history where Slack is built entirely on XMPP, with plenty of extensions to support all the customisations for every feature they have now.

Writing and maintaining a protocol and a client and a server is certainly harder than just having a private proprietary protocol.

For what it is worth it seems XMPP is cherry picking features proven in proprietary protocols and standardizing them. It seems like there is a small set of such critical features as can be seen by supported XEPs in modern clients (https://dino.im/ https://conversations.im/).