What will it take to convince people of a federated protocol like XMPP? Someday, maybe, we can make people care about open protocols and decentralization.
We've tried Matrix in our friend group and it was impossible for us to get it to work. And that was with a non self hosted identity provider.
Signal isn't perfect but it seems to offer better privacy and is trivial to set up.
That is everyone's dream. The problem is every startup/project with $$$$ is investing into reinventing the entire client/server wheel (Signal, Wire, matrix, threema, etc..) instead of investing their $$$$ into making a user-friendly client for an established/reliable protocol.
In this sense, and despite all my criticisms of email/XMPP ecosystems, i'm a big fan of delta.chat and conversations.im. They took a well-established federation, and applied lots of UX/security on top, so that people don't have to choose between freedom and security, and can enjoy modern features in backwards-compatible, federated way.
> Signal isn't perfect but it seems to offer better privacy
Compared to SMS yes. Signal evolved from smssecure/textsecure which was an encrypted SMS app/protocol (which continues to this day as silence.im though barely maintained by a single exhausted volunteer).
But Signal is a central actor that has power over all users at the same time (compared to a federated network like email/matrix/XMPP) so it's less healthy. And in particular, Signal uses servers from big internet giants which thanks to signal using Google's push notifications server on Android (the reason why the libresignal/f-droid vs signal "controversy" started) can give them a really good overview of who's talking to who.
I trust that Signal employs some really clever cryptographers and very competent UX designers. I just don't trust anyone (including myself) to hold the privacy of the entire planet, even less so when their plan to protect metadata relies on shady tech (intel SGX) and shady actors (amazon/google) not proper systems architecture, and they have openly/strongly opposed decentralization and standardization/interoperability (see "The ecosystem is moving" and/or the libresignal drama).
> Compared to SMS yes.
Unencrypting messengers, for sure. I was also thinking of messaging client that encrypt but aren't open source (e.g. WhatsApp) and clients that don't encrypt messages consistently (Telegram).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It opened up another "level" for me of considerations to think about. I agree that a federated system are the next step in the right direction. For now I'll just enjoy for a while having completely removed myself (and some from my social circle) from the Facebook ecosystem.
I didn't set up my own server though, that was through matrix.org. And probably an intermittent issue.
That video explains the setup very well if one is inclined to run their own server. Thanks for sharing.
Integrating with Slack, IRC, etc all in one app has also been quite convenient.
While WhatsApp already sucks (each time I try their bloody web app after years it still doesn’t work), other apps have solid quality. Telegram is easily two orders of magnitude more valuable to me than Matrix.
If someone logs into my account on another device, how can I know it? In Signal, Telegram etc there is a place in settings that lists all the logged in sessions. But I can't find anything like that in the 'Conversations' android app. Am I missing something?
A lot of people are actually less likely to adopt something if I promote it since I'm "that guy" who only uses FLOSS and open platforms. Promotion works better with people who don't know me IRL.