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.
to answer your question - if you wanna eventually talk to normies. like cute boy/girl you meet at a bar or a business contact from a random meet. even Signal has dogshit penetration compared to the big players, so XMPP/Matrix/Briar/etc aren’t even a blip on the dradis.
also, you sorta sidestepped the UX. if you’re coming off the hyper-polished world of Telelgram and iMessage, all those things have dogshit UX. yes, you’ll eventually find your way around them but you have to be motivated to endure them ugly and slow and unrealiable apps (comparatively speaking); you got that shit covered, your contacts do not.
the situation is kinda like with The Linux Desktop - it’s competing with gargantuan corpos with unlimited resources, and to add to that the miniscule dev teams aren’t working together, they’re competing, pulling in different direction (Gnome, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.) with duplicated efforts and tons of abandoned paths. can you imagine where we’d be if all that dev effort went towards one goal?
same thing with the messenger space, it’s doubtful any of them will become mainstream, but they have their uses.
Wrong, XMPP is the only option that actually lets you talk to baddies on their phone number without them downloading a new app just for you. Aside from some kind of tortured solution such as AirMessage/BlueBubbles involving buying a literal Macbook.
i agree the bubble color trash is shitty and manipulative, but i’m unaware of any baddies using open XMPP at any bar for their messaging.
Cheogram offers a phone gateway. They don’t even know they are using XMPP.
does it work with whatsapp, telegram, fb messenger and insta contacts? i didn’t find it from a quick google, but i’m sold if that’s the case. i mean, that’s what baddies are using.
Matterbridge works with some of those, but I doubt anyone wants to talk to a relay bot. Just directly get people’s real phone numbers and run the Insta from your home PC in browser. All of those apps are cancer and even in a separate profile on Graphene or some shit, I would feel like a dirty bastard.
Oh, since you mentioned Telegram, I ought to mention that it’s totally possible to puppeteer your account on there so it looks just like you are using the real app. If a lady asked me to use TG or Signal I would unironically assume she knows drug dealers 😭
It does, but that kind of thing defeats a lot of the purpose of leaving these apps in the first place. Same with bridges that work in a hacky way. I usually sandbox these apps and hope for the best.
I consider FOSS third party clients an improvement (but not a solution) in most of these cases btw, so i’m very open to alternatives that are practical while keeping my semblance of a social life.
Yeah if you want to use Signal and TG, Molly and AyuGram are a bit better than stock FYI
til about ayugram, thanks for the rec, ill try it out.
do you happen to know of anything similar for whatsapp?