A giant leap forwards for encryption with MLS

Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 74 points –
A giant leap forwards for encryption with MLS
matrix.org
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I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

The lists of public xmpp group chats I've found are all centered around xmpp software - clients and servers. If I ever find myself in the position of launching or running a large community (unlikely), I'd try to offer an xmpp-powered chat. It seems like the decision today is Discord -> Matrix -> IRC - xmpp isn't even in the running. But maybe users have to be a little more vocal.

This is my experience as well. It’s a little disappointing. Still, if anybody has suggestions for xmpp communities I’d be happy to hear it!

You could just roll out your community on XMPP and offer a web+anonymous access to it (converse and movim could be good options). In the end, that's no different than discord and many users' first exposure with Matrix. Now that I think of it, there's a mod_converse for ejabberd and maybe even for prosody as well.

Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I've used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn't create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia's xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.

My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn’t create a community.

how would you define a "community"? And how big a deal is this effectively?
As far as I'm aware, communities (if defined as a list of rooms under a same namespace) are native to XMPP in the sense that MUCs can be namespaced at the domain level (e.g. "welcome@mycommunity.server.tld"), and then it's up to clients to do something about it. I've seen some discussions going over jdev recently but there didn't seem to be too much interest (even though clients have had a decades-long head-start to tease potential users).
IMO/IME, the "community" approach as found in discord & al. is rather detrimental and makes the relevant information hard to track because of excessive (per-server/community) rooms & notifications micromanagement. Decades old communities and projects have collaborated successfully on IRC over a single/couple of rooms and this doesn't seem like a problem in practice.
More than the proliferation of rooms, I'm more interested in threading which is seeing a comeback as of late (e.g. in Cheogram), which is somewhat more comparable to zulip and "gentler".

I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.

Let's say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.