Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that’s not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can’t wrap my head around.

I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.

XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.

You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.

You can host (tens? of) thousands of XMPP sessions on a RPi at the back of your router or in a field hooked to a PV panel and sim card, and none of “the wealthy” knowing or caring about it, though. The difference with signal is that everyone can do that, and everyone doing it expands the network and makes it more resilient for the benefits of all.

How it works (to simplify) is them giving up on matrix clients ever becoming performant and well behaving on handheld devices (because of the absurd complexity of the protocol), and, instead of doing something about that, just decided to shift the client logic onto the server and castrating the clients (esp. for offline features). It’s also good short-term business because it makes hosting Matrix even more cumbersome and expensive, giving a compelling reason for the type of midscale/corporate deployments previously on the fence about their self-hosting costs (due to poor design and scalability) to just pay Element for that (while probably contemplating an alternative future).

Matrix has the tendency to require all participants’s servers to replicate all of the room state (who joined when, who said what when, whose avatar changed to what when, …) practically forever, and is sucking a ton of bandwidth and CPU for the privilege. It’s pretty bad, unfixable, and, if you ask me, over hyped.

Speaking about XMPP, compared to centralized services, at least the “who talks to whom” and metadata concerns in general are partially mitigated by not having all the metadata converge towards a single host, being able to selfhost, and being able to host behind tor/i2p/…

Other options for what exactly? Telegram practically has the same privacy and encryption guarantees as late 90’s forums and bulletin boards. If you want to learn nothing from that, keep using a centralized nonstandard service deprived of end-to-end encryption!

With only one having your interests at heart. An easy choice.

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

wowh, that looks absolutely disgusting, huh, I mean, authentic. Well done! (I’ll avoid it like the plague for PTSD reasons)

Is connect opensource nowadays? How do you know it does what it advertises otherwise?

rmayayo@lemmy.world if I click on this link in boost, it opens in the browser, and then when I share from there, the only boost related action I can see is to create a post. Would it be possible to have an action to “handle” the link and open the thread in boost? Eternity has this capability, fyi :)

I was mostly using sync while waiting for boost to get a Lemmy port, and could make sync to look and feel pretty close to boost for reddit. I had a rather pleasant experience with sync overall. Both are pretty similar out of the box, very configurable and very polished, but now that boost for Lemmy is out, I’m back on boost. Not that boost has a killer feature that sync’s missing, just that I find boost subjectively better.

I’ve found it best explained in some stackoverflow answer mentioning the pet vs cattle analogy. In short, if you know how many servers you have from the tip of your tongue, and what they do more or less, then they are akin to pets: you treat them well and keep an eye on each of them.
Kubernetes is meant for when you have so many of them, that come and go without you even noticing or caring, bearing a number for the sake of production/cost control, this is cattle. Needless to say that this is not your typical app/company running at such a scale, and that there is a 24/7 team of “ranchers” keeping an eye on the herd.

Rule of thumb for kubernetes, if you are learning it “for fun” or on your own, you are not gonna need it :)

The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform.

yeah, as I wrote above, that’s no different in XMPP (but probably much more secure and better maintained: till recently most of the bridging in matrix-world was leveraged by libpurple, which has an horrendous security track-record).
If you are getting into bridging in XMPP, I recommend giving slidge a try: https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/

that is is against ToS for most apps

https://slidge.im/core/user/low_profile.html#keeping-a-low-profile

google kinda “killed it”.

And yet it has hundred folds more users than Matrix :) XMPP is ubiquitous (it props up google cloud/nintendo switch push notifications, if your online game has a chat system with million users that’s it, WhatsApp is using it, you have billions of IoT devices running it, …) so just like Linux it can’t really be “killed” at this point as a critical piece of software infrastructure. On the user-facing side, things are alive and kicking with great and well-maintained clients (which is more than can be said about matrix, being a single-source implementation held together by a single company constantly fighting financing issues).

Interesting, but I got past that hurdle…

I was thinking more of the “day to day admin” side of things rather than “getting it running for the first time”: ejabberd really runs like clockwork, demands no effort, no attention, packs all the features you need, and uses close to no resource.
By that time, I’ve been hosting services for communities for decades, and a good argument in favour of keeping XMPP, no matter how much adoption it would eventually get was that ejabberd is one of most “fire & forget” software I’ve ever deployed. Right now I have an instance running with 500 users and it barely ticks above 150MB RSS.

In comparison to that, synapse for a dozen users, especially in the early days, was a burning hot mess. The whole stack is rather fragile and I was always worried about something breaking up, or resources going wild. If you are solo admin with users across timezones depending on you, that might matter a lot.

You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.

Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).

Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)

And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).

Absolutely, and an argument can be made about captive ecosystems controlling both clients and servers. They also represent a single point of failure, so there’s no magic bullet. In practice it’s also not that different than keeping up with your browser’s/OS’/phone’s updates and XMPP has that for itself that it has (unlike Matrix) a vibrant community of clients and servers supported by diverse parties (commercial and not).