As someone who’s been using ttrss for decades but would be open to trying something new, what would you say is FreshRSS’ killer feature (and missing killer feature) compared to ttrss?

(Not trying to start a flame war, ttrss feels like a finished project, which is not a bad thing, but I think it’s healthy to wish for more innovation in this space)

How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.

Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn’t look so).

Aren’t they not the same thing at all?

The problem I’ve observed with XMPP as an outsider is the lack of a standard. Each server or client has its own supported features and I’m not sure which one to choose.

That’s a valid concern, but I wouldn’t call it a problem. There are practically 2 types of clients/servers: the ones which are maintained, and which work absolutely fine and well together, and the rest, the unmaintained/abandoned part of the ecosystem.

And with the protocol being so stable and backwards/forwards compatible in large parts, those unmaintained clients will just work, just not with the latest and greatest features (XMPP has the machinery to let clients and servers advertise about their supported features so the experience is at least cohesive).

Which client would you recommend?

Depends on which platform you are on and the type of usage. You should be able to pick one as advertised on https://joinjabber.org , that should keep you away from the fringe/unmaintained stuff. Personally I use gajim and monocles.

They both qualify as “open, federated messaging protocols”, with XMPP being the oldest (about 25 years old) and an internet standard (IETF) but at this point we can consider Matrix to be quite old, too (10 years old). On the paper they are quite interchangeable, they both focus on bridging with established protocols, etc.

Where things differ, though, is that Matrix is practically a single vendor implementation: the same organization (Element/New Vector/ however it’s called these days) develops both the reference client and the reference server. Which incidentally is super complex, not well documented (the code is the documentation), and practically not compatible with the other (semi-official) implementations. This is a red herring because it also happens that this organization was built on venture capital money with no financial stability in sight. XMPP is a much more diverse and accessible ecosystem: there are multiple independent teams and corporations implementing servers and clients, the protocol itself is very stable, versatile and extensible. This is how you can find XMPP today running the backbone of the modern internet, dispatching notifications to all Android devices, being the signaling system behind millions of IoT devices, providing messaging to billion of users (WhatsApp is, by the way, based on XMPP)

Another significant difference is that, despite 10 years of existence and millions invested into it, Matrix still has not reached stability (and probably never will): the organization recently announced Matrix 2 as the (yet another) definitive answer to the protocol’s shortcomings, without changing anything to what makes the protocol so painful to work with, and the requirements (compute, memory, bandwidth) to run Matrix at even a small scale are still orders of magnitude higher than XMPP. This discouraged many organizations (even serious ones, like Mozilla, KDE, …) from running Matrix themselves and further contributes to the de-facto centralization and single point of control federated protocols are meant to prevent.

public Matrix server

Let’s see how long before it bankrupts you

Most containers don’t package DB programs. Precisely so you don’t have to run 10 different database programs. You can have one Postgres container or whatever.

Well, that’s not the case of the official Nextcloud image: https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud (it defaults to sqlite which might as well be the reason of so many complaints), and the point about services duplication still holds: https://github.com/docker-library/repo-info/tree/master/repos/nextcloud

You can typically configure the software in a docker container just as much as you could if you installed it on your host OS…

True, but how large do you estimate the intersection of “users using docker by default because it’s convenient” and “users using docker and having the knowledge and putting the effort to fine-tune each and every container, optimizing/rebuilding/recomposing images as needed”?

I’m not saying it’s not feasible, I’m saying that nextcloud’s packaging can be quite tricky due to the breadth of its scope, and by the time you’ve given yourself fair chances for success, you’ve already thrown away most of the convenience docker brings.

See my reply to a sibling post. Nextcloud can do a great many things, are your dozen other containers really comparable? Would throwing in another “heavy” container like Gitlab not also result in the same outcome?

Well, that is boldly assuming:

• that endlessly duplicating services across containers causes no overhead: you probably already have a SQL server, a Redis server, a PHP daemon, a Web server, … but a docker image doesn’t know, and indeed, doesn’t care about redundancy and wasting storage and memory

• that the sum of those individual components work as well and as efficiently as a single (highly-optimized) pooled instance: every service/database in its own container duplicates tight event loops, socket communications, JITs, caches, … instead of pooling it and optimizing globally for the whole server, wasting threads, causing CPU cache misses, missing optimization paths, and increasing CPU load in the process

• that those images are configured according to your actual end-users needs, and not to some packager’s conception of a “typical user”: do you do mailing? A/V calling? collaborative document editing? … Your container probably includes (and runs) those things, and more, whether you want it or not

• that those images are properly tuned for your hardware, by somehow betting on the packager to know in advance (and for every deployment) about your usable memory, storage layout, available cores/threads, baseline load and service prioritization

And this is even before assuming that docker abstractions are free (which they are not)

and why would that be? More abstraction thrown in for the sake of sysadmin convenience doesn’t magically make things more efficient…

Take that as you want but a vast majority of the complaints I hear about nextcloud are from people running it through docker.

Would be nice to be able to run WG on the NAS directly and not need a server, wouldn’t it? I believe there are a few go/rust userspace WG servers out there but I don’t know if anyone’s using them for anything like that.

Except for a marginal fraction of the top YouTubers, aren’t most of them getting paid to inject sponsored links and from donations/patronage these days? It seems that the deal you are referring to has been off the table for a majority of YouTubers for a very long time now, and I don’t see why other platforms wouldn’t be as good, or even healthier than YouTube to provide them that kind of revenue.

Or , with, you know, federation?

Why keep giving cloudflare a monopoly of the internet traffic? Isn’t the whole self-hosting movement about breaking out of the tech giants’ shenanigans and promoting a healthy alternative with a decentralized and robust internet?

I think you got lost because self-hosting is very much the point of this community :)

The Keep features you enumerated are pretty rudimentary, and none of that requires the sheer engineering power of a Google to be delivered securely and effectively. Take something like quillpad for instance, it shares a lot of UI paradigms with Keep, but expands in every direction to make the note taking experience and keeping them organized better. So indeed, Google Apps as a captive ecosystem is hard to beat, but resisting the urge to put all your eggs in their basket has some enormous perks which people with experience value a lot.

IIRC, Nintendo switches use xmpp extensively as well. Whatsapp is a modified version of xmpp. Many apps in the wild use xmpp for notifications, signaling and pubsub.

Why’s that? Keep looks and feels like a pretty basic note taking app, I don’t even see any of the usual google “secret sauce” that would make it better, smarter, or more embedded… what is it about keep that you find inimitable?

True, but very unlikely (once your ssh client is configured once and for all), and in that event you can always switch connection (use a data network, proxy, vpn, hop from another server you have ssh access, etc)