Most of the problems in the current internet landscape is caused by the cost of centralized servers. What problems are stopping us from running the fediverse on a peer to peer torrent based network? I would assume latency, but couldn’t that be solved by larger pre caching in clients? Of course interaction and authentication should be handled centrally, but media sharing which is the largest strain on servers could be eased by clients sending media between each other. What am I missing? Torrenting seems to be such an elegant solution.
Better question: how come we aren’t all using XMPP for chat instead of the current mess we have? Why can’t we just bring back XMPP with encryption? I don’t get people, all for federation and shit but when it comes to messages everyone suddenly forget that XMPP is the original and truly open messaging solution. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server. Pretty much like lemmy, true interoperability.
Currently, attempts at bringing back XMPP has been horrible. Some instances have different plugins, which often break things. Some have e2ee some don’t. XMPP is great but the current attempts are bad. Matrix is good enough for now.
I believe the worst part of XMPP isn’t the instances but the lack of a decent cross platform client that actually supports everything and has a decent UI. For eg. iOS clients are all shit. Without decent clients and push notifications people won’t be using XMPP ever.
Questionable…
What’s wrong with Matrix in your opinion? I found it works fine for chat and group chat. Maybe video and audio calls lack but other than that it works fine.
There are some things such as metadata leakage and the server isn’t the best at being lightweight.
I have read that they have improve the metadata leakage. And the server being lightweight is being working on too , on the new version.
Use construct.
Exactly my concerns, also Matrix isn’t an open standard, truly standardized. It is way more prone to be taken over by some company or ecosystem later on. For what’s worth what is even the Matrix Foundation? Where does the money come from?
The iOS clients have gotten miles better in recent years. It’s still far from perfect, but I’m grateful for the improvements.
What’s the best one in your opinion?
Siskin, but it doesn’t do push with omemo perfectly. Monal does that better.
Great, I used Monal a long time ago and it was buggy maybe I’ll try it again.
I stopped using monal in favour of Siskin, but I think it’s gotten a lot better recently too. My problem was monal started sending notifications for every message in every chat room at some point so I uninstalled it. I assume this has been resolved.
I feel the same way about RSS feeds. It’s a technology meant to keep up with updates on nearly anything across the internet. Even social media sites. It’s been available for ages. But no one is pushing for sites to provide them. 🤷♂️
That’s why I use FreshRSS.
Debatable, likely because Google pretty much killed it.
Meanwhile, IRC just keeps trucking on.
The software landscape for XMPP isn’t the best. I twisted the arms of my immediate family and have them using XMPP messaging with a Snikket server I set up, and we’ve had lots of issues between OMEMO support and the lack of good messaging clients for iOS. It works, but it isn’t the smooth-out-of-the-box experience that non-techies want/need.
That’s another reason why I will never buy an iPhone there are no apps available for niche stuff such as XMPP or Managing torrent for my Linux ISO’s
Do you download ISOs directly on your phone? If not, lots of clients have web interfaces that make it trivial to manage from any device with a browser.
I use Monal on iOS and it’s worked quite well so far. I admit I just joined the XMPP adventure.
SMTP is federation too. But certain megacorp basically fenced off huge chunk of users.
Yes, that’s exactly by point. SMTP is federation, you can setup your own server and have interoperability with others and have 100% of its features working right, so you aren’t locked in to those megacorps. Chat applications should use XMPP to get the same for chat/video.