this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2021
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Privacy

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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.

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[โ€“] [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)

[โ€“] [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.