this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Privacy
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Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.
Monero-paid VPSes cost more, and given this fact, my €5 VPS (with a few other services already running there) would apparently not be enough for Synapse... But an XMPP server runs perfectly.
Poor people (who still can afford the end devices and an Internet plan) can of course share the costs in a community, or use one of the many free servers, as long as they are aware of the tradeoffs. Beigers not being choosers, and all that.
You can also choose to use technologies that aren’t such resource hogs. The eventual consistency model of Matrix alone & storage costs causud many medium-sized operations to shut their doors. Distroot.org for instance had to move to XMPP to deal with costs—& I have personally seen others.
Does XMPP have feature parity with Matrix? I presume that bridges exist?
They are called gateways https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/
You can do basically everything except multiuser encrypted calls (we use Mumble for this anyhow). But even then Jitsi (& proprietary Zoom & WhatsApp) are built atop XMPP for the backbone of their protocol using XMPP to negotiate connections before handing off for calls.
Thanks, useful information.
While storage is my main concern (my VPS is very limited in this regard), there is also the fact that you can very well end up with nasty materials stored on your server without a convenient way to delete it. Even if you don't let strangers have accounts on your server.
My uploads folder is mounted with noexec. It’s easy to set your storage usage & upload quotas in Prosody or Ejabberd.
I was talking about Matrix - specifically the fact that it stores every message and piece of media on every participating server, unlike XMPP. Indeed not had such a problem on XMPP.
Yes, the eventual consistency model works more like a blockchain. Sliding windows are only hiding this fundamental flaw of data usage. It has an advantage against censorship, but it isn’t worth it & chat is better treated as ephemeral than permanent (look at how much info is lost behind proprietary Discord communities).