this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
158 points (98.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39435 readers
13 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 54 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (10 children)

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

  • Does the server support MUC?
  • Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
  • Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
  • Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
  • If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

This is the correct answer, IMO.

I loved using XMPP back in the day, but I struggled talking with people who weren't on the same server as me because of spec and client variations.

While Synapse is a resource hog, it (and Element) - to a certain degree - does the job. Can't wait until sync v3 lands in the main server.

The only issue I have is with one friend who insists on deploying his own version of Synapse, but can't figure out coturn and - as a result - we can't voice chat properly.

Goddammit. Two steps forward, one step backward. 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Suggest your friend to give Eturnal a try maybe. I have it running on an Oracle free tier instance, and I use it daily to have video calls with my family using Synapse/Element (and Jitsi inside Element for group calls), and it works great. The documentation is very good too.

Edit: this is my Eturnal config, for reference:

eturnal: listen: - ip: "::" port: 3478 transport: udp enable_turn: true - ip: "::" port: 3478 transport: auto enable_turn: true - ip: "::" port: 5349 transport: tls enable_turn: true realm: turn.<MY_DOMAIN> tls_crt_file: /etc/letsencrypt/live/turn.<MY_DOMAIN>/fullchain.pem tls_key_file: /etc/letsencrypt/live/turn.<MY_DOMAIN>/privkey.pem tls_options: - no_tlsv1 - no_tlsv1_1 - cipher_server_preference

And the compose file: services: eturnal: container_name: eturnal image: ghcr.io/processone/eturnal:latest environment: ETURNAL_RELAY_MIN_PORT: 49160 ETURNAL_RELAY_MAX_PORT: 59160 ETURNAL_RELAY_IPV4_ADDR: <REDACTED> ETURNAL_RELAY_IPV6_ADDR: <REDACTED> ETURNAL_SECRET: <VERY LONG RANDOM STRING> volumes: - ./eturnal.yml:/etc/eturnal.yml:ro - /etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt:ro restart: unless-stopped read_only: true cap_drop: - ALL security_opt: - no-new-privileges:true network_mode: host

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Ooh, I'll tell them to try it out - looks cool, cheers!

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)