That's true.
You need to run your own platform people. XMPP is plenty simple, plenty powerful, and plenty safe -- and even your metadata is in your control.
Just self host. There's no excuse in 2024.
Wake up people!
Why should the arrest of someone else affect YOU?
I'm someone who's been on the business end of a subpoena for a platform I ran, and narcing on my friends under threat of being held in contempt is perhaps the worst feeling I'm doomed to live with.
"XMPP is ..." not the solution I'd recommend, even with something like OMEMO. Is it on by default? Can you force it to be turned on? The answer to both of those is, as it turns out, "no," which makes it less than useful. (This is notwithstanding several other issues OMEMO has.)
This is not true, it depends on the client. Conversations has OMEMO enabled per default.
What this means in practice is that you shouldn't focus on whether XMPP (or Matrix, or whatever) protocols are encrypted, but whether the applications enforce it. Just as there are many web browsers to choose from, there are many messaging apps. Use (and recommend) apps that enforce encryption if that's what you want.
So far, I'm not seeing that same consensus from the XSF and client vendors. If the capital investment can be made to encourage that same culture, the comparison can perhaps be a little closer.
There are even apps like Quicksy which have a more familiar onboarding experience using the mobile phone number as the username, while still being federated with other standard compliant servers. There is little reason to use walled garden apps like Signal these days.
Gung-ho evangelists rarely convert like a reasonable take on the subject does
> Just self host. There's no excuse in 2024.
May I remind you what the average person is like with this recently famous reddit post:
If you want self hosting to happen, with things like Matrix, and so on, the hard truth is that it has to not be easy for someone who can program, but trivial for someone who says "wow, can you hack into <x>" if they see you use a terminal
Self-hosting is terrible in that it gives Mike, the unbeknownst creepy tech guy in the group 100% control over the metadata of their close ones. Who talks to whom, when etc. It's much better to either get rid of that with Tor-only p2p architecture (you'll lose offline-messaging), or to outsource hosting to some organization that doesn't have interest in your metadata.
The privacy concern Green made was confidentiality of messages. There is none for Telegram, and Telegram should have moderated content for illegal stuff because of that. They made a decision to become a social media platform like Facebook, but they also chose not to co-operate with the law. Durov was asked to stop digging his hole deeper back in 2013, and now he's reaping what he sow.
https://www.medianama.com/2023/12/223-signal-push-notificati...