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You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

Yes, but if you put it a public library you will be opening yourself for all sorts of copyright trolls trying to sue you for file sharing.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Monal works fine now.

No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.

That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.

Again, if “venture funding” is some sort of cheat code, why can’t XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?

nominally FOSS

Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes

Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.

The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays

rather about not shitting into your own water supply.

And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? “if you are on iOS, use siskin” is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? “People shouldn’t be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn’t spend our resources on it?”

Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don’t want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.

I am not trying to distort anything, I just don’t agree with your “venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists” premise. I don’t see what going after government contracts has to do with “open source funding” and I don’t think that “using VC funds to give away free stuff for developers” is something to be held against them just because the XMPP companies are not willing to risk it.

If the XMPP business are thriving in the IoT space, good for them. But to me, as a consumer, this means nothing if they are not willing to compete in the space.

Also, as long as we are talking about Free Software for the end product, I honestly do not care about who is funding it. All I care about is that I can find some way for my parents to talk with me and see their grandkids without depending on Facebook/Google, and if doing it with Element/Matrix is easier than doing with XMPP/siskin, then I’ll be using Element. I don’t need any of them to pass some arbitrary purity test, I just need them to deliver something minimally usable.

So, companies working on XMPP are healthy and thriving, but they can not afford to extend into the consumer space because… they don’t want to go up against Discord?

makes business sense if you care about the longer term survival of your company

Then you make a separate entity to take risks in that space, kinda like what Amdocs did with Matrix?

I’m sorry, you can’t have it both ways. Either XMPP consumer XMPP is in a dire situation because Element beat ahead of the others due to their VC funding, or businesses working on XMPP are not interested in the consumer space because they don’t see it as worth the risk. But it makes no sense to claim that Matrix has achieved bigger mindshare with no actual merit in making a more accessible product, and that XMPP is acceptable as is.

Now, that is quite a stretch. We had almost 15 years of zero interest rate economic policies, all the “cheap” capital available to everyone and you are telling me that none of the companies with a vested interest in XMPP managed to get resources to grow because Element was sucking out all the air from the room?

If getting XMPP to be in a state that could compete with the proprietary messengers were that much cheaper than the resources taken by Element, why is it that none of telcos pushed for it to have something to show in the OTT space? Or why couldn’t Process.one/Prosody get any VC interested when there are so many firms that make a living of just copying whatever is trending?

You are trying to rationalize XMPP’s failure to get more adoption by blaming Element, but this is not a zero-sum game. I’ve been to XMPP meetups, and absolutely no one ever talked about initiatives to make it more appealing to masses. Everyone just wanted to geek out and scratch their own itch. If the XMPP community never valued commercial success, fine, but then don’t act like someone else robbed their lunch when all Element did was do the work that XMPP supporters didn’t want to do.

If that is true, then why can’t the existing and current players in the XMPP space do it?

Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.

And where would they get this money in the first place?

Sorry, but now this is starting to sound like sour grapes.

Ok, they got a good amount of funding. But that alone is not enough to justify how they managed to gain as much mindshare as they did in relation to XMPP.

Element’s funding in 2018 or 2021 did not steal any opportunity for (e.g,) snikket to work on their product. Element following the “cathedral” model allowed them to be faster in the development of multi-platform clients, while the XMPP devs were all fixed to the Bazaar ideal, and because of that absolutely failed to deliver a modern application in the platform that is used by half of mobile users in the US.

We (techy types) tend to ignore things that end users care about and we are a lot more forgiving with systems that we see as “technically superior”, but the market cares a lot more about things like “Can I send emojis without having to worry about what client people use?” then “synchronization model or disk space requirements”.

This is not just “marketing”, this is “having someone with actual business and product sense”.

If it was up to me, sure I’d wish that more people would be using XMPP. But in 2019 when I told my parents that I wouldn’t be using WhatsApp anymore and that we needed a different app if they wanted to have video calls and see their grandchildren, XMPP was not even a choice for my iOS-using father, and Element (née Riot.im) was at least usable.

They were doing that before 2021. Even acquired gitter and ported it to Matrix.

Ok. I lost track of their funding. Seems like they raised $30M in a series B round in 2021.

Still, look at the timeline. 2021 is not that long ago, and Matrix was already ahead of XMPP in mindshare by then. It’s not really fair to say that this money was only spent in marketing, and it is not fair to say that without it XMPP would be making some comeback.

Yeah, I mentioned it in the first comment. But seriously, it looks like something built in 2009. It might be functional, but only a die-hard XMPP fan would be interested in using it.

several million Euros of venture-capital to fund a marketing campaign.

Citation needed. Matrix was funded by Amdocs initially, then got investment from Automattic and has gotten some contracts from European Governments, but AFAIK there is no “VC investment” and there certainly aren’t “millions to fund marketing”.

They do have better marketing than any XMPP developer, though. You basically don’t hear anything from process.one or the Prosody devs.

Conversations on Android seems to be the default answer for “advanced client”.

But for everything else… look at Monal’s blog, they only added support to audio calls in October of last year. Nice to see it’s still being developed, but “too little, too late” seems fair.

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.

If you don’t mind me asking, how much are your current costs? My infra for managed hosting is way over-provisioned. If you are using your instance just for yourself, send me a DM and we can work out a deal.

caddy can serve the files and deal with SSL certificates in case you put this in a public domain.