Privacy

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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.

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Why Signal over Jabber/XMPP? (piefed.world)

submitted 4 days ago by TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Over the past few years I have gone through a bunch of different apps and protocols to find the best one for "securely" communicating with my family and friends.

I ended up with the amazing XMPP protocol and my family/friends frequently use its clients to contact me.

Monal for IOS and Cheogram/Conversations/Quicksy for Android. The android app I install depends on if I can get F-Droid on their phone or not.

It's been great with OMEMO encryption and the clients/apps available for XMPP. But sometimes I have issues introducing people to it.

Jabber (friendly name for xmpp) sounds silly to say. The clients all have weird names. And after trying the Signal mobile app it feels more focused than what anyone in the XMPP community has whipped up.

But the capabilities of XMPP makes it better.

Signal Cons (immediete)

Centralized
Single app
Phone numbers

XMPP/Jabber Cons

Picking server
Apps are sort of less friendly

What really scares me about Signal is the centralization. Any nerd can easily host an XMPP server these days. But Signal from what I've heard really wants us to use their server.

If XMPP gets more attention I'm sure we can get people supporting projects and creating better apps.

I keep seeing people recommended Signal instead.

This is a bit of a tired ramble. What I wanna know is why anyone is preferring Signal over XMPP apps. I assume it might be not knowing about it. Tell me what you use to message people.

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago

I use Telegram. Eek? It's just my wife and I though. All these things I've heard about Telegram? Never actually seen them in mine. I have looked at groups, but I've only seen memes, crypto crap, and what look like scams ("post this in 5 Reddit threads to get invited to the actual group"). There's nothing of value out there that I've seen. So I just use it to message my wife, because texting wasn't good enough when we started using it (both our phones have RCS now) and I don't use Facebook, and she doesn't have an iPhone (so, no iMessage).

I completely reject this notion that you have to pick one and stay with it. My messaging apps include iMessage, Session, Signal, and Telegram. I also have a fork of Telegram that lets me use it from my watch (as in, it has a watch companion; official Telegram does not). I also have Discord (need it for a couple things).