Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
What are your thoughts on xmpp? Recently I have come to like a lot and am pretty active with friends there.
There are people using xmpp? Last time I set up a server and tried using it with Pidgin, I couldn’t find a soul that used it
They’re out there. The Venn diagram of people still choosing IRC (as opposed to being forced to use it b/c that’s where the community is) is probably just a circle.
I was a big XMPP user back in the day, but because of the lack of multi-device message syncing and the really shoddy state of encryption, I wandered away. Plus, using XML for the protocol really geeked me out. XML is a document format, and per the spec, to be well-formed it needs to have an open and matching close tag. Jabber hacked around this by making a sort of infinite document - you get the open tag, but never the close tag - and it just felt really icky.
I understand a lot of these things have since been addressed. I don’t know if XMPP still uses that bastardized version of quasi-XML without a close tag. But other things have come along that I like more. About 6 months ago I started running a client on my desktop again, but like you, nobody I knew was still using it, and nobody new was advertising it as their connection info, so… yeah. After a few months, I stopped running the client.
Irc isn’t the competitor of xmpp. Discord is
I didn’t mean to suggest that it was. I meant that the kind of people who voluntarily choose IRC are the same sorts of people who would voluntarily choose to is XMPP. While IRC is older than XMPP, it’s still the 1:1 chat protocol for old technical people.
Do older technical people use 1:1 chat? I would think email is more common
Who do you think invented XMPP?
Yes, email, but it’s not real-time chat. Jabber sat between community chat IRC and the digital snail-mail analog, email.
@sxan @shortrounddev jmp.chat uses XMPP, and it’s a very viable replacement for Google Voice (and generic SIP options like voip.ms), so that’s what got me back on the XMPP train. No one else other than my family is using it with me, though, but it’s still nice to have SMS, (encrypted & decentralized) family chat, and IRC (via biboumi bridge) in one desktop client.
That’s interesting; the integration with SMS is a nice feature. Thanks!
You do eventually get the close tag, when you log out. Lol
Xmpp is mostly used for private groups and 1:1 chat, so more of a WhatsApp than a Discord replacement.
But you can find some public channels here: https://search.jabber.network/
The issues you mentioned have been fixed, and XML was never an issue 😅
xmpp is still valid but the new kid on the block is activitypub. I don’t think I’ve ever hosted an xmpp server but to me it’s a better suited (mature, focused)protocol with plenty to offer that AP can’t yet.
having said that, stillll no moderation on free networks.
XMPP feels dated and has to much protocol sprawl.