Geminauts XMPP Chat

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2021-04-17

geminauts@chat.kwiecien.us

xmpp:geminauts@chat.kwiecien.us?join

After months of deliberation, I decided that I really did want to create an XMPP MUC (chat) for Gemini. Among the reasons I was holding off on doing so was that I had long been maintaining a group on Delta Chat for this purpose.

Why Not Delta Chat

I like Delta Chat for a lot of reasons. It is surprisingly rich, is quirky/cool like Gemini, and it's e-mail based. It sort of appealed to the Gemini ethos of being both going forward and backwards in time. Along with the pros, however, come the cons:

Delta Chat is slow at the protocol level

Delta Chat is slow at the client level

Setup is really more complicated

Not enough people use it

The fact that it's slow to send and recieve messages is not that big of a problem, because we like slow. It's e-mail, and we like e-mail. However, for a group chat somehow waiting those several seconds to have your message sent starts to wear on you. At the client level, the desktop client is this monstrosity written in Electron, which just shouldn't have been done. The Android client is lovely, though.

In terms of setup, that's another issue. It's not just that you need e-mail address for an ID, but you need a compatible e-mail address. You can't or at least shouldn't use Google or other mainstream providers, and even then your provider might not want you sending out so many e-mails to so many recipients. Using multiple clients at once is doable but requires a modest amount of tinkering to set it up right. Then there is the mess it will create in your mailbox, though it does its best to be tidy.

For Geminauts, however, the main problem was lack of users. A surpsing number of people have joined. The first chat had up to 20 people, but before long they all went AWOL. Later new people came and rekindled interest, which resulted in the current chat with 11 people, but predictably most of them aren't there anymore. A few of us (three or four?) are still hanging on.

XMPP remedies these problems in many ways. XMPP is just fast, period. It has good native clients on so many systems, which Conversations on Android and Dino on Linux are two rock stars of the FOSS federated chat world. Overall the user experience is quick and simple, and using multiple clients is no problem at all. On top of that, I know a lot of Gemini users already use XMPP, as I have come across many.

Why Not IRC

Now, another reason I held off on doing this is that we already have the official Gemini IRC channel. You can even use it on XMPP by simply joining #gemini@biboumi.tilde.team, which I've mentioned in the past. So technically it's already on XMPP.

IRC has its many downsides. I don't want to delve deep into that at the technical level, and I know people like it. In many respects XMPP functions similarly to how IRC does, at least in terms of what the end user sees, plus a variety of improvements in terms of features and usability. For example, staying connected to IRC all the time and keeping up with it is more effort than checking Conversations on my phone from time to time.

It's not just a protocol thing, though. The main reason why I decided to make this MUC and not just direct everyone to the IRC channel is that I want to maintain that the two have different topics:

Geminauts Is Social

That's really the point that I want to drive home with this group. It's not trying to be the official Gemini chat or anything. It's not going to be just about the protocol or the project at a technical level, but I want this to be primarily a place where users can hang out. It's the kind of space that many have wanted, though obviously this is not a hard dividing line between Geminauts and other resources like the IRC channel. (Talking about Gemini itself is allowed here, being social is allowed there.) I'd like to maintain, though, that this is like a social social club or offtopic chat, and project discussions might best be directed toward the mailing list or the IRC channel.

Obviously, everyone is welcome to participate!