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.
@Ferk has given a more elaborate answer. As for servers shutting down. Haven’t had it happen yet. With any service you always risk servers shutting down or failing, even centralized ones like signal: so that is a bit of a nirvana fallacy.
I didn’t compare it to signal. I just asked if that was the facts of the situation.
If I were to compare it might be to the topic of this thread which I can self host and thus control.
However, since you opened the door on signal I’d comment that the entire signal org would have to go down for that to happen, not just a few servers. Is simplex managed by a large well funded entity that is unlikely to fail or are the servers more mom & pop setups? What happens if Kurt Cobain wakes up one morning and shuts down his server?