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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Weird that they included openpgp and omemo as encryption methods but left out the much more popular OTR system for XMPP.

I get that OMEMO is the future but very few clients support it currently, and as I understand even less servers support the features required to support it.

Oh and OpenPGP just sucks for instant messaging. (long-lived key with no forward secrecy)

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OTR is a dead end. Pgp for people who want to use it and omemo for everyone by default is the way to go. Latest release of Conversations also removed OTR. It's not needed. Having more than one option is already confusing enough. Having 3 is just crazy. What was blocking omemo implementation was problems related to libraries not being available before with licenses that made sense. That seems solved now.

OMEMO adoption seems to be on a roll:

* https://omemo.top/

> even less servers support the features required to support it.

Does the server require something special to support OMEMO?

You will probably need at least Message Carbons (XEP-0280)[0] to synchronise your devices and maybe Message Archives (XEP-0313)[1] to have some kind of history available to them. However this not really tied to OMEMO itself, it's just to provide what's expected of a modern IM experience. I think all servers support them nowadays, anyway.

[0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html

[1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

To answer my own question, OMEMO requires the server to support "XEP-0163: Personal Eventing Protocol". XEP-0163 seems to be more or less supported everywhere. It is sort of amusing that it was originally intended for stuff like letting your contacts know what song you are listening too. Now that it is an OMEMO requirement it has for all practical purposes become mandatory.

Well, not everywhere. But a good number with some notable services left out. Here's a chart: https://conversations.im/compliance/

I guess OMEMO was their priority at the time, and PGP was quite easy to handle.

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