this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2021
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Privacy
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Guys, I use and love both XMPP and Matrix however I don't see masses adopting them in fact I can't even convince my immediate family to use them. People want reliable push notifications and cute stickers :-) I think Signal is a good compromise, I know it's US based (I discuss this in the post) however it's zero knowledge. The code is open source if there were vulnerabilities we would probably know by now...
The problem is that you as average user have no way to confirm that the app on your phone is actually compiled from the published source code. In that regard it would help if Signal was distributed through F-Droid, which compiles directly from source, but the Signal developers have explicitly forbidden that.
Yeap, I thought Axolotl was promising, and it actually interacts with Signal servers with no issues (calls not encrypted so far), however AFAIK it only works as a secondary device, not the main one (I might be mistaken, but I understood that from another lemmy post). I could live with only a Matrix client (unfortunately only Element.io is as featrure complete) and a Signal/Axolotl client, on a pinephone or similar gnu/linux phone, but it seems not possible, and even a Matrix client for a gnu/linux phone is not that clear to me (the gnu/linux clients are desktop oriented ones).
At any rate, I was hoping one could replace Signal with Axolotl, since it does hook to the Signal servers, and interact with them, but I guess I was just hoping...
BTW, matrix alone, won't allow me to connect with any but only 3 contacts of mine (whom I personally installed Element.io for on their phones and computers), but NO one else unfortunately, so I guess there needs to be a trade off, and Signal might be the one feature rich enough, and definitely safer and more private than Whatsapp. Other alternatives oriented to security and privacy might be valid as well, but I don't see them as adopted for a trade off, neither as feature rich. I'm still hopeful a truly decentralized, totally FLOSS, feature rich and easy to use and adopt will get main stream. So far it's having something (still far from perfect) for just a couple of contacts, and a trade off for the rest you still want to keep in touch.
You can totally build signal from source yourself or just use their verifiable builds.
You can help educate people though. Try to teach people to use their computing devices instead of being used by corporations. Fewer and fewer people nowadays can really admin their devices, both from a technical and an educational viewpoint.
Ask around what the problems are for your family and report them as bugs or vote (don't write +1! Use the emoji reaction feature on Github etc.) for them on their respective bug trackers. For my mom I found out that she doesn't have issues with the software itself but can't find or doesn't know how to use the features it has. Fluffychat is an example of a slightly better Matrix client on mobile than the "default" client Element.
Stickers are already implemented in Element and other clients via third-party integrations, but they're being reworked to be included in the base Matrix specification.