Privacy

33499 readers

399 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Conversations a XMPP client that beats the alternatives (f-droid.org)

submitted 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am really confused why not more people consider switching to the Conversations XMPP client (or the blabber.im fork).

It has all the features comparable to WhatsAPP/Telegram/Signal/Matrix etc. but is fully libre, e2ee, decentralized and by far the most privacy preserving. And you can easily use a XMPP Desktop client like Gajim or Dino with the same account.

And there are tens of thousands local and non-profit XMPP servers to use and self-hosting a XMPP server for your and your friends & family can be easily done on a RasberryPI from home or really cheap VPS (contrary to Matrix).

There is really no comparable alternative out there, so it is really baffling that it gets recommended so rarely.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

I would recommend Quicksy for most people that I communicate with rather than Conversations. Whatsapp/Signal have demonstrated that phonebook contact discovery is quite effective in getting the network effect by easing the burden of sign-up and adding contacts.

Personally, I'm using Conversations, and then gauge by whether or not I'm likely to lose the interest of a friend by adding the extra step of signing up on a server and then manually adding contacts before I decide which of Conversations/Quicksy to recommend.

I wish there was an iOS Quicksy equivalent, all the iOS xmpp clients lack the polish of Conversations and the ease of sign-up of Quicksy. Unfortunately, for most of my friends on iOS I've resorted to using Signal until something better emerges.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I don't recommend Quicksy as I disagree with the phone-number use, but sure, it is Conversations made to work with phone-numbers, even by the same developer.

As for iOS... generally iOS should be avoided, but there are supposedly two relatively nice XMPP clients for it: https://siskin.im/ https://monal.im/ (I never owned a iOS device, so no idea how they hold up in praxis)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago

I also disagree with phone-number use, but there's a trade-off with what we want everyone to use and what we want to personally use. Phone-number based signup is more effective for most people to sign-up and it's not possible to compete with that no matter how much you explain why it's worse.

I agree with avoiding iOS, I wouldn't buy an Apple device, but I can't do anything about my friends and family who use Apple. I've found Monal to be better than Siskin for OMEMO and push-notifications (anecdotes from a friend on iOS who puts up with me insisting on using xmpp). That said Conversations is more feature complete and nicer.