Privacy

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Why Signal over Jabber/XMPP? (piefed.world)

submitted 3 days ago by TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That's the part that makes me nervous. If I get a bunch of people locked on Signal, then they take away services or change how they run the servers, then it would be a hassle to move people to a completely new interface.

[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah. Let say Signal goes down because of Big Tech and lets say that 50% of their users use Signal as their only messaging app. What will happen then? Hysteria!

No, XMPP all the way for me until Signal becomes decentralized with zero external connections and when they also have removed the phone number requirement.