YHK - yet another hacker news clone

24 points mtlynch 1 hour ago 16 comments

I love open-source software and open protocols, but my family and friends primarily communicate through SMS for exactly the reasons in https://xkcd.com/2365/

Whenever XMPP or Matrix threads pop up on HN, several commenters casually mention their "friends and family XMPP (or Matrix) server."

How did you convince friends and family to move away from SMS/WhatsApp and replace it with a niche messaging app?

My family and friends aren't hardcore nerdy, but they're more tech-savvy than average. Their needs in messaging are mainly pragmatic: they want ease of use, reliability, and fun features. They don't care that much about privacy, decentralization, or extensibility (though I care about those things a lot).

I've been experimenting with self-hosting XMPP and Matrix servers and clients in the past week, and the UX is even worse than I expected. It seems like all the clients either imitate Slack, imitate Discord, or imitate hot garbage. I haven't seen any that try to be a simple, friendly replacement for SMS. I'm a software developer who uses computers all day, and I find the UX for most of the clients incredibly hard to use.

The only angle I could see to pitch XMPP/Matrix to people for non-philosophical reasons are that there's a more consistent experience across iOS/Android. The biggest shortcoming I think is visible to regular users is that there's feature degradation and missing information when iOS users have SMS conversations with Android users, especially in group chats.

For people who have successfully won family and friends to XMPP or Matrix, what was your pitch? What do you recommend others do to make XMPP or Matrix an attractive experience for a regular person?

yepyoukno 1 hour ago | parent

Improbable. This technology does not have a stable client and is overrun by garbage.

Try vibe coding your own app that your family and friends would install, and have this as the background communication layer.

Good luck!

bawolff 21 minutes ago | parent

You are getting downvoted, but i can't help but wonder the same thing. Matrix/element is one of the worst chat clients i have ever used. Nothing works.

Forget normal people. How are you convincing techies to use this. Obviously there are other open source E2E encrypted chat programs that are half decent, but i never understand how people are convinced to use matrix of all things.

SoftTalker 14 minutes ago | parent

Some people are drawn to complexity and tinkering. Many of them work in tech.

Arathorn 3 minutes ago | parent

what things didn't work, and what server & version of Element were you using?

MattJ100 1 hour ago | parent

Curious if you've tried Snikket, and what hurdles you ran into (if you did). I made it with the primary purpose of moving my family communication over to XMPP, and I succeeded with that (improving a bunch of stuff in the process). I'm not claiming it's perfect (a known weak point is the iOS app, but we're actively working on solving that...)

mtlynch 59 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for creating Snikket!

I tried Snikket and ejabberd on the server and found Snikket way easier to use.

I haven't tried any Snikket clients because I'm tinkering with web apps to start and it looks like Snikket doesn't have a web client yet outside of the admin portal.

I really like that Snikket allows me to create invitations without relying on SMTP. I love having it just as a URL I can send however I want.

I wish I kept better notes on my Snikket onboarding because I did run into a few hiccups.

I find the concept of "Circles" unclear because I don't understand how it differs from regular users. Thinking about it more, I'm assuming the idea is that I might have a family group and a college friends group, but I don't want my dumb college friends messaging my mom even though they're all on the same server?

My more superficial note is that I find the admin UX a little rough. It feels a little early 2000s design where everything is a form submit when there could be more JS interactivity (and this is coming from someone who hates JS frameworks but likes minimalist JS like htmx). And there are four top-level admin actions, and one of them is "Invitations" but that seems to duplicate everything available to me under "Users."

MattJ100 43 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, no web client yet, but we're working on a web app (it exists already, but doesn't do end-to-end encryption fully yet, also no video calls). My primary use case for Snikket was displacing things like WhatsApp where web usage is (in my experience) rare, so the focus has been on mobile apps.

Circles - yes, you got it. Initially we launched without circles, and some people complained they couldn't invite friends to their server without those friends mixing with their family members by default. I wasn't sure at first, but now even use this feature myself for e.g. a "Games night" circle. You can read more about the feature here: https://snikket.org/service/help/features/circles/

And yes, I totally get what you mean about the web dashboard. We're toying with replacing it at some point (partly because the backend is Python, and it uses over 2x the RAM of the chat server when idle!).

cf100clunk 32 minutes ago | parent

''right now we want to focus on doing one thing and doing it well''

https://snikket.org/about/goals

kudos to that!

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

My advice is not specific to Matrix but other self hosted private services. Some of this may or may not be feasible with Matrix. (I have never used Matrix)

- Whether family or friends, always suggest it as a "fallback" for when "preferred service" is down and to use when discussion ultra-sensitive topics or sharing financial files. With time they may just stay connected to it if the friction to do so is low. It has to be their choice, not yours.

- What helps? Add more incentives such as perks that "preferred service" does not offer. No file size limits. No or few file type limits. No content filters. Add emoji's or gifs that align with their inside jokes and their style of humor. Keeping random people away is very important. Making your friends and family administrators or moderators and let them decide how it operates. Do not moderate or power-trip over your friends or family or they will leave. Limit rules to "Do not break the laws of this country in public chatrooms". Database and file backups become even more important but they will feel in control of a thing. Have a keyword or code word they all learn means to go check the private platform that "primary platform" would not recognize. Maybe when they see "Turtle Farts!" they know to go log into your service.

- They may just stay on their primary preferred service. Every group is different and not every group will see the benefits of your fallback service. They may not appreciate the work you put into setting it up for them. Do not expect to get the friends of your friends and family to move to your service. They may not appreciate the OpSec value until "Bad Things"(c)™2038 happen to enough people. Just be there for when it does.

- If there are concerns that you would spy on them, consider instead using eJapperd or Prosody as you can implement OMEMO for individual and group end-to-end encrypted messages. Set up TLS fingerprint checks from multiple locations to reduce the risk of MitM attacks until XEP-0474: SASL SCRAM Downgrade Protection is fully supported by both servers and all clients by default. This is the only thing holding me back from setting up a public Prosody server as 0474 is still experimental. See [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264

vekntksijdhric 34 minutes ago | parent

this is great advice, thanks

eesmith 39 minutes ago | parent

I was in a very different situation. Microsoft decided to stop supporting Skype, which we had been using for 15 or so years. We moved to Matrix.

SoftTalker 16 minutes ago | parent

Weird how badly MS bungled Skype. It was the online video calling/meeting platform. It had become a verb: I'll skype you at 2:00.

dlcarrier 25 minutes ago | parent

In trying, I discovered that most family members don't want to use anything that lets the government spy on its users, but one sibling is against privacy in general and only wants to use platforms that allow the government to spy on users, so there's no solution.

vekntksijdhric 21 minutes ago | parent

interesting, most of my family and friends simply don't care one way or another, as long as it is convenient to use (for which whatsapp et al. win by a mile)

Apreche 20 minutes ago | parent

Make sure that everyone in your family is a huge nerd. That’s the only way.

fishgoesblub 10 minutes ago | parent

It was easy getting the family I talked to on Matrix to switch to XMPP, all I had to say was "imagine Element, but it actually works".