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Comment by rascul | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting on a decent Android client (preferably open source) which does text, voice, and video. Without that, XMPP is effectively dead for me nowadays. Otherwise I'll never be able to get my friends off of Facebook Messenger.

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How often do you use voice+video with Facebook? Is it always voice+video or sometimes just voice?

I use Jitsi Meet links for now, for the rare time I need voice+video, because it works no matter what my contact has installed (more or less)

I do voice and video regularly, it's effectively replaced regular phone calls between my friends and I. Jitsi meet is cumbersome for this type of use, we can't send messages or call each other without first coordinating to use it.

I wish Conversations would support the voice and video stuff, but somehow they decided against it. Otherwise Conversation is a very decent XMPP client for Android.

Try just getting one of them to sign up. You don't need to have all your friends chatting via XMPP, sometimes it's good to just have one friend that you can talk about this stuff with.

Also you don't have to use XMPP, Signal is an open source worthy alternative to WhatsApp and FB messenger.

It's not worth the effort for just one person. I need a service a majority of my friends can use. And they're not interested in something that to them is essentially the same as AIM from 20 years ago.

I really want to like Signal, but the phone number requirement just won't work for me. In the last five years, I've had a phone number for only about one year, and it's changed three times. I'm just not good with holding on to phone numbers. It's a large part of why I rarely communicate via phone calls or SMS.

I've tried Wire, but there were issues getting notifications on Android. If this has changed, maybe it can work for me now. I would prefer XMPP but I do like Wire.

I wouldn't say XMPP did not change for 20 years, have you seen https://conversations.im/ ? Except voice / video (that I personally use rarely either way) I don't see any important modern feature missing.

Not saying it didn't change, that remark came from a non tech friend of mine, and it's hard for me to disagree without getting into boring technical stuff they're not interested in.

I'm not talking about boring technical info but user visible changes like easy image / file sharing, "X has read until this point..." etc. They are small changes and already present in proprietary solutions but for users this is a visible change.

I put my entire family on a self hosted server and for them it looks like any other modern messenger. (no voice video calls yep).

Signal isn’t really open source the way Firefox or Linux is... you can audit the source code, but you can’t connect to the network with a modified version.

It’s nice that we can audit the source code. But it’s kind of pointless if you can’t modify it.

Matrix[1] has an encryption scheme based on the Signal double-ratchet (which was based on the OTR scheme) called Olm, and is completely federated with an open standard. So you can run your modified version, and be the only person who keep a history of your conversations (only the homeservers that participate in a conversation store the chat history).

Matrix also has features like bridges to other chat systems, as well as a plethora of clients thanks to being an open standard (the most popular is Riot).

[1]: https://matrix.org/

Signal is also effectively limited to smartphones due to the phone number requirement, making it even less free.

You can use Signal desktop - all you need is a phone to receive a confirmation text message, but that needn't be a smartphone.

Even that is too much to give to a chat application. In most cases a phone number is tied to a person, requiring that is pretty much requiring a full name.

I guess one could sign up with a Google Voice number or something, but the whole idea of requiring a phone number for anything not related to a phone is just ridiculous to me.

Even more ridiculous when Walmart almost wouldn't sell me tires because I didn't have a phone number. It took three different managers to figure out how to put in 000-000-0000.

I hope I'm incorrect, but as I understand it would be impossible to make a decent XMPP client on Android.

Any app wanting to get push messages _must_ go via Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, other processes with long running services or network connections will be killed off in favor of longer battery life.

Conversations.im does just that, uses FCM to get the messages in the background. They recently open sourced push server that interacts with FCM: https://github.com/iNPUTmice/p2

The battery consumption of Conversations with or without FCM is about the same. (Battery consumption in both cases depends on a lot of factors like frequency of messages, quality of network or even how often your operating system kills Conversations due to a lack of memory. But eliminating all those factors battery consumption is in the same ballpark. The only difference from an end user perspective is that Conversations doesn’t have to ask for a Doze exemption if you use a server that has the push extension.

Like Conversations?

I use Conversations for text and Jitsi Meet for voice/video (or jmp.chat for voice and SMS, but that's not XMPP on the voice side, only for SMS). Jitsi doesn't require an account to use which is especially nice.

Does it do voice calls and video chat?

This is something that annoys me as well... Especially since with webrtc the browser can do this native, so why is there nothi avaiable?

Woah. Friends on FB messenger sounds like lost friends. :( Sorry to hear.

Lost friends? I don't understand what you're referring to.

I think he is implying that he would personally never use FB messenger, so he would not be able to maintain contact with those friends.

My goal is to leave Facebook Messenger completely, but I'm not going to do that until I can get something setup to replace it that my friends will use.

I have set up a Spectrum transport and now I use Messenger with XMPP client, gradually migrating some contacts from the transport to native XMPP :)

Interesting idea, but it doesn't seem to solve the problem of a missing Android XMPP app that does video and voice.

Same. I'm currently using FB Messenger, Hangouts, Signal, Telegram, IRC, Matrix, Keybase and it's really depressing how only FB Messenger from all of those is in my opinion competitive for just group and private messaging. Everything else just lacks some really useful feature, not to say some of those don't offer a few new features, but they're not usually useful enough.

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