Magic wormhole, Bitorrent
toastal
joined 4 years ago
Install a family XMPP server like Snikket or otherwise. Show them the benchmarks of how little battery & data plan drain is used from Conversations forks. Explain how bloated Electron apps are & how you don’t wish that on your loved ones vs. Dino, Gajim, or a TUI client. Sidecar a Movim server so y’all can share long-lived, non-ephemeral posts instead of losing memories like photos in some long group thread. Let them know their data is safe with you as the operator instead of some massive for-profit corporation—and if they don’t trust you, they are empowered to start their own server to interop.
(This tactic has yet to work for me, but I will keep running into that wall til it breaks 😃)
Signal still requires a SIM card & an Android or iOS primary device. Usernames here just let you cloak your phone number, not keep it a secret from the service.
We can start it up again. Time to nudge in the next Lemmy AMA to allow XMPP addresses alongside Matrix. You’d be surprised how little things like that can nudge adoption & pique curiosity.
It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).
XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications -- while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.
"reputable"
Projects like this should be self-hosted & encourage contributors to set up their own self-hosted mirrors to make sure the code is both distributed & decentralized which users/makers have full control over their platform.
So is WhatsApp, Zoom, Jitsi
Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.
Syncing for 15 minutes
Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.
My brother, XMPP existed before Web 2.0 where after the cost-cutting way to ship an app was a browser option (browser options help accessibility tho)—where Electron was the most egregious RAM stealer. OMEMO has been around for multi-client double ratchet e2ee since 2015. An ejabberd server can be tuned to handle 2 million simultaneous connects—Synapse folds over like lawnchair at a single user joining a room with a medium-length history.