I really wish XMPP just worked in every conceivable way

@kirby making Seminaly Enhanced XMPP (seXMPP)

@kirby

@Inginsub @kirby @anemone

@Inginsub @kirby

he said this i was there when his omemo certificate could no longer be found

@kirby ontologically that is not xmpp;

xmpp is only xmpp because it doeesnt work in every concievable way

@meeper @kirby there’s always ircv3

@mia @meeper there is but no one has squeezed encryption into it yet

@kirby @mia

(this is a good thing)

@mia @meeper @kirby irc+xml vs xml

@meeper @mia ..i agree but at the same time i would prefer to never have to use telegram for confidential comms. signal is better in that way but you need a phone number to use it, the worst barrier to entry possible

@kirby @meeper xmpp isn’t much better tbh

groupchat e2ee is notoriously hard to get right and its absence is also the very last thing that’ll get your secrets leaked

@mia @kirby yeah its quite good. Clients still have some unnecessary usability friction imo but hopefully that goes away

@mia @meeper tell that to an unreasonable person and they'll just point at xmpp and say "si pero ezzempeepee le hace"

@meeper @kirby things will get better, yes.

fwiw past initial setup at least some of those clients offer far better UX (coming from someone with ADHD) than everything else, which has been my main reason to prefer IRC. i’m not using this because i’m wearing nostalgia goggles or something, it just genuinely works best for me

@mia @meeper and that won't be an insignificant chunk of people in the foss world (the primary userbase of xmpp id assume). foss people ride or die with old habits

@mia @kirby are the web clients atm any good. I've some plans to host a chatroom and I feel a web based client on the host url would be quite effective to get people to use it (at least regarding more normie folk)

@kirby @meeper idk i change my shit up all the time. literally 20 years ago i was trying really hard to get people to switch to xmpp, and it still sucks just as much as it did back then

bizarre turn of events that irc is suddenly getting attention, protocol changes and entirely new clients

@meeper @kirby i think so? dunno what people use for that nowadays, maybe thelounge?

@meeper @kirby there’s also kiwiirc and gamja

but i haven’t tried any of them

@kirby @meeper the best explanation i have is that xmpp is just extremely corpo-brained because it’s nothing but a set of loose building blocks for chat platforms. it can never work unless the entire ecosystem is under centralized control

whereas IRC is just this little piece of hacker culture that can take whatever shape its users want, and no one will stop you if you use a shell script, age and ircv3 message tags to bolt e2ee to your client

@mia @meeper @kirby as soon as you have optional extensions on both sides you're just back where XMPP is

@icedquinn @meeper @kirby the difference is that with IRC you often get multiple implementations in the wild as solutions to practical problems before anyone thinks of writing a spec

i think that’s an important difference

@kirby @mia @meeper
> use telegram for confidential comms.
> signal is better in that way but you need a phone number to use it
You don't need one for Telegram now?

@mia @meeper @kirby
OMEMO in XMPP is *very* flaky if you have more than 2-3 devices on your account, Pofanity is more strict in this regard and it always keeps complaining to me that it can't update the PEP where the keys are stored, Gajim often gets access lists wrong, it works consistently in Conversations, but I think it's only because it's always online.
Basically it works and you can read the messages that get sent to you right now, but older ones are "Unable to decrypt message" — it's what people on Fedi are complaining about Matrix, but twenty times worse. Matrix at least consistently works for me with a dozen devices, I mean as time passes and you keep logging in and out, the structure in your account similar to PEP where the old keys are stored becomes too big and reading messages from a year ago in group chats becomes problematic — but it doesn't happen too often, with OMEMO group chats it happens much sooner.
Also in Matrix you can at least give your devices descriptive names — perhaps bad from privacy perspective, but at least you can guess which key belongs to which device, with OMEMO they are just strings of hexadecimal digits and I'm often puzzled: "What's this?! Ah, okay, it's probably me from Gajim. And this is probably Profanity on my other laptop, but what the hell is this then?"

@kirby Works on my machine.