Privacy

42526 readers

1752 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

114

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

submitted 1 day ago by TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip 12 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Signal may not be the best in a technical sense, but it is good enough and it has the network effect. I've been pleasantly surprised when in the span of a few months I met two different people actually in real life, who happened to already be using Signal.

Signal is also just as usable as the big tech alternatives, which makes it not a very hard sell to friends and family. For quite a few years now I have managed to convince everyone I communicate with to do so over Signal. There is no chance I would be as successful with something else.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

yes baby steps. more important to get rid of zucc and his big brother eyes on everyone than to be 100% perfectly private from the get go.