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.
I try to get people to add me on musicbrainz and link up music services to it. It’s cool bc you can funnel music player program listens, funkwhale (which is activitypub!), scloud, spotify, yt music, apple, all of their ʜᴏᴛ ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ right, but it still works with open source shit. It can absorb lastfm which a lot of ppl have hanging around. None of this solves the reality of being at an information disadvantage vs someone who plays weird games with IG likes. But are people like that worth the stress anyways??
But if you get each other’s music recs and can dm realistically what else do you need? Am i boring? Lol
Right? Although I’d love to communicate with everybody in my community and be reachable on the ready, do I really want to give up my values for people who don’t care to understand them? If you wanna contact me outside of face to face, then use what I use. And it goes for the other way around too. Not worth the stress.