Comment by topdancing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by topdancing | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For the past two years; I've been using Conversations (Android), Dino (Linux), and friends of mine have been using Gajim (Windows), Monal/Siskin (iOS).

All of these work fine with OMEMO (the iOS ones gained better OMEMO and push support in the past few months) and message history retrieval between clients. Gajim doesn't do inline images, but the rest do.

I occasionally use profanity as a console client and that recently had message archive support land in Git.

So, yeah, no idea what you mean by developers giving up - if anything, the ecosystem has greatly improved (minus group OMEMO on iOS).

Oh, and Dino got support for doing encrypted calls to Conversations a few months ago: https://fosstodon.org/@dino/106228549009869402

Maybe not developers in general, but development of Pidgin certainly stalled, which is why I stopped using it. Too man features not implrmnted in XMPP and no working support for e.g. Skype.

I didn't say developers "gave up", but even as of 2019 it didn't seem like things were moving forward in any meaningful way.

Even just for OMEMO support, we all had to compile a plugin for libpurple/Pidgin, and it didn't even have full UI support so was very difficult to use when things didn't work automatically.

We used a gajim but iirc, to get OMEMO support we had to compile that too.

But I'm truly glad to hear the ecosystem has improved - I would have much preferred to have stuck with XMPP. But in 2019/2020, Matrix offered all this and more and worked very well. It was impossible to make the case for us to stay on XMPP.

I use Conversations and Dino daily, they're awesome. When I'm stuck on MacOS or iOS I use BeagleIM and ChatSecure, though Monal looks a little more slick...maybe I should try that.

There are a few options yet for XMPP clients, I have some hope for the ecosystem...!

I think Monal can't do encrypted group chat yet.

> minus group OMEMO on iOS

siskin.im has support for OMEMO encrypted group chat

Reply on news.ycombinator.com