@icedquinn i never got anything except plain text to reliably work with xmpp, expecially file transfers.

i think the old line based protocols like IRC are residing in a very deep local optimum. everyone tries to replace them, and either it's not really worth it or things are killed by the own complexity.

only problem IRC has is that E2EE is hard to do within 512 characters ;)

@icedquinn what worked with xmpp was GPG :)

@bonifartius i used the thing that came before omemo for a while. i think we only trashed it because omemo is supposed to work with group chats.

not real big on line protocols. i prefer things carry length prefixes

@icedquinn nothing wrong with prefixed lines, it's more about how the data is formatted. sonething IRC, SMTP, etc. do seems to be correct.

unfortunately everything is bloated json now which somehow manages to be even worse than bloated xml.

@bonifartius i shitposted about using OSC for something like this

the ember+ specs are not too bad. they are kind of long, although not entirely without reason. those model everything in the world as a tree though.

@icedquinn ASN.1 is probably one of the more sane choices for encoding things, yeah. I do like the ascii line protocols though because they are rediciously easy to parse as well, even when they not follow a particular standard.

ember looks interesting!

@bonifartius they subset BER and then use it to encode a graph of nodes with parameters. seems like a pretty clean way to go actually.

@icedquinn i downloaded the pdf, i'll give it a read :)

@iron_bug @icedquinn i'm increasingly disenchanted with many modern protocols, even if the projects are a good idea.

e.g. matrix has some nice parts and good ideas, but the protocol is in reality just a moderately good rest api.

XMPP works fine, but XEP hell killed it.

i think with many protocols there just are too many moving parts so you always end up with unintended side effects or things not working properly across implementations.

@bonifartius @iron_bug the xeps are fine. any extensible system that gets actually used will accumulate schemas.

its mostly an issue because the desktop programmers died and all we have now are webshits

@icedquinn @bonifartius I mean normal RFC protocols, designed by serious engineers. not handcraft by amateurs. ActivityPub is also terrible, because is's just raw and undefined for the most critical cases. but tox is fine, it's well designed and works just fine.

@iron_bug @bonifartius
> well designed

it isn't, though https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

@icedquinn @bonifartius in the example user supplied M has A_priv key. but man, if you have stolen somebody's private key it means the account is lost. because the account in Tox is defined by provate key.

@icedquinn @bonifartius I also think that idea of extensions is fine by itself. the hell begins because of incompatibility of different realizations, though. there should be a method to exchange between clients with information about their capacities to avoid failures.