Hacker News: nicoco

New comment by nicoco in "Running My Own XMPP Server"

nicoco — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:02:36 +0000

TBH I am not well-versed into DNS and certificates and security, but I guess you have to trust your provider with a certificate for `example.com` if you allow them to manage JIDs of the form `anything@example.com`, indeed. Again, I am not very knowledgeable about the subject, so take this with a grain of salt.

New comment by nicoco in "Running My Own XMPP Server"

nicoco — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:52:14 +0000

Web client, but I think movim has GIF picker and screensharing features. It even does multiparty video calls, compatible with dino. Since it's P2P, it does not scale well to a lot of users, but the developer is working on SFU support for larger video calls.

New comment by nicoco in "Running My Own XMPP Server"

nicoco — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:34:02 +0000

Revive your prosody and set up https://slidge.im/ for Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal. It's not a proper solution I know, but at least you'll keep on using XMPP clients and they'll get better because they will have one more user at least. ;)

New comment by nicoco in "Running My Own XMPP Server"

nicoco — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:32:11 +0000

I know at least two services that offer hosting with your own domain: https://my.snikket.org/ and https://account.conversations.im/domain/ so I suppose it is not that complex to setup.

New comment by nicoco in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

nicoco — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:22:57 +0000

I have had success getting apple-loving friends to use https://monal-im.org/

https://snikket.org/ are working on a new iOS client too (no release so far).

New comment by nicoco in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

nicoco — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:14:52 +0000

https://monal-im.org/ is my personal recommendation for iOS.

New comment by nicoco in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

nicoco — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:10:43 +0000

The targeted audience of this website is, for now, developers. Communicating is hard.

https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.

New comment by nicoco in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

nicoco — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:05:58 +0000

It is used in a non-federated context as the underlying in a lot of places (NATO, Zoom, british Military, Grindr, Jisti…). Federated usage is mostly private chats that don't really want to advertise that they do use it. It is sad because public groups also just work, but I know clients are missing a few features that would improve usability/UX. Some people are working on that, cf https://movim.eu/ for instance.

New comment by nicoco in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

nicoco — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:00:50 +0000

You can with dino. I wish I had the time to work on getting A/V calls back in gajim. It could be worth asking an NLNet grant for that…

https://dino.im/

New comment by nicoco in "Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years"

nicoco — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:56:44 +0000

Sure.

In practice, in federated networks bad actors end up being blacklisted. It does not provide any "formal" guarantee, but… it tends to work fine enough. For this specific "deletion request" feature, of course it should always be seen as a convenience thing, and absolutely not about security.

As with many engineering things, it's tradeoffs all the way down. For instant messaging, a federated approach, using open protocols, offers what I value most: decentralisation, hackability, autonomy, open source. My options in this space are Matrix or XMPP. I have not attempted to self-host a matrix server, but have been very happy with my [prosody](https://prosody.im/) instance for almost a decade now.

New comment by nicoco in "Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years"

nicoco — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:44:11 +0000

An open protocol can mandate indeed, but that is still in the realm of pinky promise security. A better design for a privacy-friendly chat protocol is to not write a lot of stuff on a lot of different remote servers when that's not necessary IMHO. One of matrix's selling points is to be censorship-proof though; in that case copying stuff as much as possible makes a lot more sense.

New comment by nicoco in "Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade"

nicoco — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:40:45 +0000

uv pip is a full reimplementation of pip. Way faster, better caching, less disk usage. What'd not to like about it?

New comment by nicoco in "Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server"

nicoco — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:13:05 +0000

I have been running a family and friends XMPP server on a cheap VPS for almost 10 years and the only downtime we had was when the datacenter burned down (OVH, true story).

New comment by nicoco in "Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server"

nicoco — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:09:51 +0000

Movim and Dino do multi-party jingle, aka voice and video group calls. Maybe you can contribute to improving it ;)

New comment by nicoco in "Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server"

nicoco — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:02:13 +0000

For (repliable) notifications on iOS, you need mod_cloud_notify server-side.

New comment by nicoco in "Fast"

nicoco — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 11:57:15 +0000

That article loses its credibility because of this, my thoughts too. Facebook and Instagram websites are among the worse offenders when it comes to "time-to-content" or whatever metric cool kids use these days. Maybe the apps are faster, but I'd rather avoid spyware on my pocket computers. Probably the author is running a $3k+ laptop and renews it every year?

New comment by nicoco in "Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google"

nicoco — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 06:21:02 +0000

Anarchists generally don't want to run things, they usually aim for that thing witj freedom, um, what's it called again... oh yes, democracy.

New comment by nicoco in "I got fooled by AI-for-science hype–here's what it taught me"

nicoco — Tue, 20 May 2025 11:00:35 +0000

I don't think it qualifies as a breakthrough. In short:

1. Segmentation is a very classical in medical image processing. 2. Everyday there are papers claiming that they beat the state of the art 3. This paper says that most of the time, the state of the art has not been beat because they actually are in the margin of error.

New comment by nicoco in "I got fooled by AI-for-science hype–here's what it taught me"

nicoco — Tue, 20 May 2025 07:13:38 +0000

I agree with that. Classically used "AI benchmarks" need to be questioned. In my field, these guys have dropped a bomb, and no one seem to care: https://hal.science/hal-04715638/document

New comment by nicoco in "AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected"

nicoco — Tue, 20 May 2025 06:09:51 +0000

I am not a AI booster at all, but the fact that negative results are not published and that everyone is overselling their stuff in research papers is unfortunately not limited to AI. This is just a consequence of the way scientists are evaluated and of the scientific publishing industry, which basically suffers from the same shit than traditional media does (craving for audience).

Anyway, winter is coming, innit?