Over the past few years I have gone through a bunch of different apps and protocols to find the best one for “securely” communicating with my family and friends.
I ended up with the amazing XMPP protocol and my family/friends frequently use its clients to contact me.
Monal for IOS and Cheogram/Conversations/Quicksy for Android. The android app I install depends on if I can get F-Droid on their phone or not.
It’s been great with OMEMO encryption and the clients/apps available for XMPP. But sometimes I have issues introducing people to it.
Jabber (friendly name for xmpp) sounds silly to say. The clients all have weird names. And after trying the Signal mobile app it feels more focused than what anyone in the XMPP community has whipped up.
But the capabilities of XMPP makes it better.
Signal Cons (immediete)
- Centralized
- Single app
- Phone numbers
XMPP/Jabber Cons
- Picking server
- Apps are sort of less friendly
What really scares me about Signal is the centralization. Any nerd can easily host an XMPP server these days. But Signal from what I’ve heard really wants us to use their server.
If XMPP gets more attention I’m sure we can get people supporting projects and creating better apps.
I keep seeing people recommended Signal instead.
This is a bit of a tired ramble. What I wanna know is why anyone is preferring Signal over XMPP apps. I assume it might be not knowing about it. Tell me what you use to message people.
TBH it’s worrying, but at the same time, it’s better to have people on something that’s somewhat Privacy-respecting.
Baby steps, you know. BTW how many here are familiar with GNU-Jami ?
Jami is a mess, when i tried it first it starting calling as it were to receive a phone call. The second time i tried it on 3 devices, out of which 2 could contact each other lol. My last attempt was when I needed to send a few strings from a (internet connected) VM to its host machine*, installed Jami on both and the 2 instances couldn’t talk to each other. Joke of a program, really.
Joke of an app ??
Not really
If the devs put work into making the backend work instead of adding shiny new features, maybe it would gain some usage, but if an IM doesn’t work between 2 devices, which is its most basic job, and this continues over span of almost a decade, it’s just not something anyone but its developers can use.
I tried using Jami with a very technical friend. The android version kinda seemed to work, though a little glitchy. The desktop linux/windows version was complete garbage, completely unusable.
What’s that? GNU-Jami?
Very similar to Signal, but Libre software & has no phone-number requirement https://jami.net/
Oh okay! Didn’t recognize the GNU in there. Was there a trademark issue in the past?
No I don’t think so. It’s a high-priority GNU project