xmpp is the solution.
use your own server, or use one of the many public ones. has clients for all major platforms, crypto is the best around (otr, gpg), does not require phone numbers or sim cards, is open and a public standard.
use your own server, or use one of the many public ones. has clients for all major platforms, crypto is the best around (otr, gpg), does not require phone numbers or sim cards, is open and a public standard.
The big problem with that one was that
- clients are wildly varying in quality. Mobile clients are quite good by now, desktop clients are rather meh, ugly, all over the place
- multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history, which was a moving target and unsupported in most clients/servers last time I checked.
That ignores that you need a good number of other extensions to make XMPP mobile friendly (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages). XMPP isn't exactly mobile friendly (chattiness, bandwidth) either, as far as I am aware.
In short: Yeah, I would love to agree that XMPP is the solution. Right now I'd say it would be at best ~similar~ to Telegram: A solution with some (different) trade-offs.
0: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations
1: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1548-xmpp_2015_-_challeng...
But - I just checked again: My xmpp server of choice (Prosody) doesn't support MAM today¹. That's a killer, without that xmpp isn't even in the same league as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. for me. I expect to be able to open my client and be able to continue a conversation at this point.
1: There's https://modules.prosody.im/mod_mam.html but it is unclear if that's in a usable state. It states at the bottom of the page that this 'works' for 0.9 and 0.10, but the 'storage backend' sections gives an example that works for 0.10 only and links to https://prosody.im/doc/storage where you'll find a table with backends. ONLY the 'sql' backend seems to support the archive store, and that's for 0.10 only. 0.10 isn't released yet. The takeaway is: MAM seems to work if you're using the unreleased version 0.10 of prosody. And .. I haven't even checked the client support yet.
Oh, you also want Message Delivery Receipts (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html), not just Stream Management (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html)
I agree with you, XEPs fragmentation is a huge mess. I'd love to see more cohesive development around that specific point instead of just discussion about the technical parts of a XEP.
Yeah that's true. But psi+ on desktop and conversations on Android work pretty good.
> multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history
I am running a prosody server, and those extensions work very well with the mentioned clients.
0.9 Works
As far as I understand this means that a service restart (or a crash) wipes your archive and I assume you won't be able to migrate your archive between versions either?
- Every server support different extensions. Extreemly fragmented.
- No reliable file transfer
- No reliable cross device sync
- Almost all clients are junky
- OTR and GPG are not the best crypto, but more trusted one as it is old and simple. Axolotl Ratchet beat them in every part.
This problems lead us to make messaging (actor.im) from scratch.