Spectrum 2 VS Synapse

This is the point where I lose everyone and a big reason for this is that people don't understand how libpurple works with Pidgin, Finch, Adium, bitlbee, spectrum2, telepathy-haze, and maybe others I'm not aware of or forgetting. So that's what we're going to try and tackle today.

> and supports bridging to other types of networks which aren't matrix-based

https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/

Turn any XMPP client into that fancy multiprotocol chat app that every cool kid want.

> Signal, Telegram, Discord, Steam, Mattermost, Facebook, Skype

https://spectrum.im/

Spectrum is an open source instant messaging transport. It allows users to chat together even when they are using different IM networks.

https://github.com/louiz/biboumi

Biboumi is an XMPP gateway that connects to IRC servers and translates between the two protocols. It can be used to access IRC channels using any XMPP client as if these channels were XMPP MUCs.

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I'm using all of those daily to connect to all my other accounts, Slidge is the most modern one and is having lots of features ported to the modern XMPP extensions.

It's actually closer to spectrum2 in how it behaves. I hope slidge will get as rock-solid as biboumi is!

https://spectrum.im/

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal.

Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device.

There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp , https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald , but sadly https://spectrum.im/ is surprisingly finicky to set up.)

There are at least hundreds of implementations of XMPP that are interoperable (at 5-6 actively developed server implementations, many more libraries and many client applications). There are at least hundreds of thousands deployed XMPP services.

In addition XMPP can be linked with other protocols/networks via bridges/gateways. Some examples:

- Spectrum: XMPP gateway project based on libpurple (support for many protocols): https://spectrum.im/

- WhatsApp bridge: https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp

- Telegram bridge: https://github.com/codingteam/emulsion

- Signal bridge: https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/slidge/ (replacement of https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald/ )

Given such a diverse ecosystem of open-source and proprietary implementations, I'd say XMPP is one of the best examples of widespread protocol interoperability that there is.

Nope, the project is almost dead (as most XMPP projects), but there are some recent commits at https://github.com/SpectrumIM/spectrum2

What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.

Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages. (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).

If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

some context re the Matrix isses, long history apparently: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481#issuecomm...

Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.

This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481

> That doesn't make this situation any less bad to the rest of the community.

How is the community suffering here? Let's say Element adds a bunch of baller stuff to their versions over the next few months and then closes the source. Can't the community just fork the last AGPL version? You might say, "well then no one can take the AGPL fork and make their own closed-source business", but do you want them to? Even if you do, they still can with the existing Apache-licensed version, just like Element is doing right now.

You're arguing that Element will lose a lot of contributions, but TFA points out that despite being super open, the vast majority of contributions are still made by Element employees (which seems to be true [0]). It's not the case that Element is looking to monetize the (small) contributions of others, it is the case that others are looking to monetize the (huge) contributions of Element.

And besides, aren't the MSCs the core of Matrix? It's already super possible to build your own compliant client and server.

The situation is that Element needs money to keep developing the ecosystem. It would be cool if there were a big network of donors and contributions, but there isn't. You're essentially saying, "that's fine, go out of business then, and the community will keep developing the ecosystem", but that's not happening now, and it can still happen anyway with the Apache-licensed versions, which again people can still contribute to.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/graphs/contributors