If you run a federated server, not all contacts might use the same server. With end-to-end encryption that doesn't really matter.
EDIT: Moreover, trust is not binary. So while your family might trust you, maybe your dad doesn't want you to be able to read everything he writes your mom or so (you get the idea).
Sadly I don't. I have mine running since a while, and some things might not be state-of-the-art anymore.
The server doesn't really have to support end-to-end encryption as that is part of the clients (in fact, there are some server-side extensions which have to be present, but those are mostly enabled by default).
Afaik, the default ejabberd configuration is very close to what you need, and there is just one part that you have to remove to enable OMEMO [1]. I don't understand why but recently the ejabberd devs introduced that part to their default configuration which makes it harder to use end-to-end encryption.
Nevertheless, if you are very interested in a detailed guide, I could write one as I am thinking about setting up a secondary server as a testing environment.
Well, while I dream the same dream, it feels awkward asking my family and friends to pay 5€ per year so that we can share the cost of running our XMPP-Server. Currently, I pay all the bills and manage the server myself (so no cost/effort for them), and they still keep using WhatsApp with most of their contacts.
I don't know what the root of that evil is, but there are undoubtedly multiple factors involved. First of all, most people have WhatsApp already.
Secondly, it is effortless to use. With federated systems, you always have to choose a provider. Once you have overcome that hurdle, the privacy-sensitive people like us do not want to share their address book with the server so finding your people is a manual setup for everyone (another hurdle).
Last but not least, the client landscape of XMPP is still far from perfect. If you want to use end-to-end encryption (e.g., OMEMO) there are finally some clients which work with each other (Android: Conversations, iOS: ChatSecure, Desktop: Gajim), but configuring all that stuff (Server + Clients), is not as easy as pushing a button. Other features like video calls are still very fragmented and rarely work if different clients are involved.
I think it would take ten dedicated developers about a year to fix all those problems (if they would agree on common goals and focus on those) and even after that, we would still have to sell the product.
Yeah, maybe I am a bit too negative about the format itself. My problem with the Flatpak only approach was that it was kinda hard to get it to run at all and it didn't work particularly well, so I ended up with putting some work into it while ending up with an unsolved problem (stable Linux desktop SIP client).
So maybe this is not an inherent problem of this technology and will work better in the future.
Why is it problematic when people hide their identity? I mean, if the criticism is valid, what does it matter who said it?
I think hiding the identity is not the real problem here. To me, it looks more problematic, that the critique is not very constructive, one-sided and loaded with imputations.
Well, you are comparing apples and oranges here. The equivalent AWS service would be EC2 and not S3. I know that you didn't start with that (as gprasanth put them in the same race), but it should be clear those two have different redundancy levels.
In fact, I don't know where AWS nor Hetzner stores the 'disk' of the VPS or even the backups. And while those are undoubtedly essential attributes for enterprise-level services, I think especially for side projects the usability of the service is quite relevant.
Please don't. There is nothing wrong with interactive tools, but by default, they should not be. So instead of making non-interactive session possible via flags, the default should be to be non-interactive. If there is an option to start an interactive session, everything is fine.
Otherwise, you would never know when your script could run into some kind of interactive session (and therefore break; possibly after an update).
I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable.
Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.
> [...] no language barrier because so many people here speak English.
I wonder how you came up with that one. From my experience (I am German myself), Germans are not good at English. It is not so bad within the large cities but in the countryside, good luck. Just take any of the Scandinavian countries and you will find that they have a higher percentage of people speaking English.
Living in Germany without learning German is a hard challenge. However, speaking German with an American accent is sometimes considered cool ;-)
I am sorry, but that is no BS, just pure facts. Granted the PC is not very powerful (CPU: AMD E-350), but the story is true. When the update started, I thought 'Shit that thing didn't just reboot itself. Okay here we are, that will take one hour max.'. But in fact, it took about 4 hours.
If you want to use Windows, just do it. But if you had to experience what it feels like when Windows thinks it is time for an automatic-forced-reboot-update which takes 4 hours the day you have to submit a thesis, then you might know why I am not so fond of Microsoft products anymore...
By the way, later that month I learned that I had been lucky as some people ended up being stuck within the update.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855347
Now it looks like I was wrong and we got just about 33% and the curve seems to flatten already:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#20