I have been advocating for a while how easy it is to integrate a lightweight XMPP server with fediverse instances. The accounts can be easily linked and the user address is the same.
Here on slrpnk.net for example every member automatically also has an XMPP account.
Every modern XMPP server supports XMPP over HTTPS (via BOSH or Websockets) and it works just fine.
But I wasn’t actually taking about integrating it in the UI of the fediverse instance itself. Which would be nice to have, but really not vital at all if you have a nice mobile chat client.
Gajim will have some more of that in the next version, Monocles or Cheogram have more modern features than Conversations and Siskin is very outdated feature wise and you should probably replace it with Monal.
That said it is not true that the three clients you mentioned have none of that. Sure they don’t have all of it, and there is some feature mismatch between them, but you are making it sound much worse than it is.
Oh and you can always use Movim which has most of the features you mentioned.
For now it seems like you need to modify and build the apps yourself to be able to use the newly open sourced backend server. This doesn’t make it very realistic to use for self-hosters.
If they ever change that, it might be worth another look.
> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.
You can’t realistically separate a instance from its users, just like you can’t separate a city (and its governance) from its inhabitants. This atomicity is a result of the real world infrastructure imposing itself on virtual communities. You can argue about “right granularity” all you want in that regard, but in result it just obfuscates where the “capture” happens and likely not for the better (as in the case of BlueSky).
Making servers a commodity is a convenient illusion that cloud vendors invented for marketing purposes.
To stay with the real-world metaphor: it is a bit like suburbs. They are sold on the illusion of individual freedom in your own home but with the required car ownership as the capture point and an endless list of negative externalities and expensive hidden infrastructure requirements making them entirely unsustainable.
Usually that decoupling already takes place on the level of VPS providers who are really good at providing a commodity service, but personally I think it is in the best interest of any slightly larger community to run their own hardware servers.
Yes it takes some effort to do so, but only when running your own servers can democratic governance of an instance really work, otherwise you are always beholden to various limitations of the VPS provider and its pricing structure.
True, but they are marketed as such, which is my point. Commodification is nearly always an illusion to vendor-lock or capture you in other ways you don’t suspect, which is exactly what ATProto seems to be designed for as well.