Readit NewsI suppose both points make sense!
This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison.
> The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc
I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP servers are used for a lot more than just chat which is why most of them don’t have good defaults for merely chatting with friends since that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.).
> The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great
True. But I appreciate that there are many options & most features gracefully fallback even on TUI clients (like ‘reactions’ just being a message reply with a single emoji). If Element adds a feature (like polls), the other clients, the new feature just doesn’t show up. For a web client, the NLNet funding is really giving a boost to Movim as a reasonable alternative to Discord that is self-hostable & federated so users—taking back the meaning of “join my server” to literally mean someone’s server & without needing to create another account just to join that server.
As for the wish… this is what XMPP MUCs are—IRC with niceties like moderation, optional encryption, & file uploads. You said yourself the resources for servers is small & for your stated use case, most existing clients can handle being IRC+features while also not being centralized unlike IRC.
Great point! I forgot that xmpp can/is used for other use cases that are not just chat.
Also I guess I should be a little more forgiving about the MUCs, and client features in particular because you are right that fallbacks tend to be graceful.
Also independently, Movim keeps advancing and Libervia is doing a ton of cool work. I'm sure I am missing others.
There has never been a better time to (re)embrace XMPP as your decentralized chat option. The clients are less buggy, handle missing features gracefully, & best part is, not being built on an eventual consistency model, you don’t have the constant syncing issue with delayed messages. If you wanted you could make an XMPP client in a day since the base spec is small/simple—& features like device verification would be seen as mandatory in the base specification.
So, last year i tried to play briefly with Prosody server to re-acquaint myself with xmpp...and it wasn't so bad. Not as great as i expected for this day ana age, bbut not terrible. The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different docs...and ultimately was smoother than expected....so i think documentation is either outdated, or was written a little less clear than expected. That being said, the low resource usage was ridiculously pleasant compared to matrix homeserver! The fact that an xmpp server allows for such scalability on such low resources is a great testament! And, that was prosody, which some folks state is not even as performant, scalable as ejabbered....so they say...so wow, that's impressive if that's true. Regardless, xmpp servers that can run on such low resource hardware but enable so many users to chat...is quite awesome!!! The client side of xmpp was a different matter; i wasn't so happy. I blame myself because maybe there might have been plugins that maybe i didn't install correctly on server side, i don't know...but it felt not as easy as i expected. The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great.
Maybe i'm spoiled? Or, maybe i did too much wrong? But if that's the case, the maybe there's an opportunity for better documentaiton? I don't know....i really like both matrix and xmpp because both live in the realm of free and open source software.....so i really want both or either to succeed. I want to live in a world where we are not beholden to only proprietary options, like whatsapp, crappy sms/text messaging, etc. I want to give props to all the folks who made and maintain all aspects of xmpp...as much as i am whining, i don't want to take away from all the hard work that they have freely given; super props to them!!!
What i really want is a modern, free and open source version of IRC, with plenty of modern features (E2EE, file uploads, presence detection, etc.), decent desktop and mobile clients, easy server installation and management, and said server-side software would ideally not need such beefy hardware to run...Or, is my wish too far fetched?
My use case looks roughly like this: for a given project (as in hobby/DIY/learning, not professional work), I typically have general planning/reference notes in a markdown file synced across my devices via Nextcloud. Separately, for some individual tasks I might have comments about the initial problem, stuff I researched along the way, and the solution I ended up with. Or just thinking out loud, like you mentioned. Sometimes I'll take the effort to edit that info into my main project doc, but for the way I think, it's sometimes more convenient for me to have that kind of info associated with a specific task. When referring to it later, though, it's really handy to be able to use ripgrep (or other search tools) to search everything at once.
To clarify, though, Vikunja doesn't have a built-in feature that exports all task info including comments, just a REST API. It did take a little work to pull all that info together using multiple endpoints (in this case: projects, tasks, views, comments, labels). Here's a small tool I made for that, although it's fairly specific to my own workflow: https://github.com/JWCook/scripts/tree/main/vikunja-export
Yeah, i like me some kanban! Which is one reason i've resisted the text-based workflow...so far. ;-)
> ...Vikunja doesn't have a built-in feature that exports all task info including comments, just a REST API. It did take a little work...
Aww, man, then i guess i misread. I thought it was sort of easier than that. Well, i guess that's not all bad. Its possible, but simply requires a little elbow grease. I used to use Trello which does include comments in their JSON export, but i had my own little python app to copy out and filter only the key things i wanted - like comments - and reformated to other text formats like CSV, etc. But, Trello is not open source, so its not an option for me anymore. Well, thanks for sharing (and for making!) your vikunja export tool! :-)
Some specific things I like about it:
* Basic todo app features are compatible with CalDAV clients like tasks.org
* Several ways of organizing tasks: subtasks, tags, projects, subprojects, and custom filters
* list, table, and kanban views
* A reasonably clean and performant frontend that isn't cluttered with stuff I don't need (i.e., not Jira)
* A REST API, which I use to export task summaries and comments to markdown files (to make them searchable along with my other plaintext notes)
* A 3rd party CLI tool: https://gitlab.com/ce72/vja
* OIDC integration (currently using it with Keycloak)
* Easily deployable with docker composeEither apps lack such an export, or its very minimal, or it includes lots of things, except comments...Sometimes an app might have a REST api, and I'd need to build something non-trivial to start pulling out the comments, etc. I feel like its silly in this day and age.
My desire for comments to be included in exports is for local search...but also because i use comments for sort of thinking aloud, sort of like an inline task journaling...and when comments are lacking, it sucks!
In fact, when i hear folks suggest to simply stop using such apps and merely embrace the text file todo approach, they cite their having full access to comments as a feature...and, i can't dispute their claim! But barely any non-text-based apps highlight the inclusion of comments. So, i have to ask: is it just me (who doesn't use a text-based todo workflow), and then all other folks who *do use* a text-based tdo flow, who actually care about access to comments!?!
<rant over>
* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.
* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.
Half-seriously, it does kinda send a signal that such a function for government (meteorology) is so essential, that it stayed lumped in with another important function of government (military/defense). I think its not a bad idea! I admit to not knowing any details at all for how its actually run in the UK...but i contrast that with the severe gutting of budgets of essential agencies in the U.S....and yet again, feel envious of other countries. (Well, maybe not envious of whomever approved the contracts for the AU BOM website, but still envious in other areas.)