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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • Yeah, XMPP has changed a loooott since then.

    XMPP’s main problems at the moment are clients, in my opinion. There’s 3 main clients for PC; one is 100% python (including frontend) and breaks semi-regularly, one does not officially support Windows and thus cuts out a large portion of the community + doesn’t have as many features as others, and one lacks features and looks extremely outdated. The state on iOS is even worse as well, and Android is fine but could be better.

    If you’re considering XMPP again, I’d recommend waiting a few months for Prose https://prose.org/ to fully release, it looks like it’ll improve the experience a lot.







  • I mean, Signal has over 100 million downloads on the Play Store alone. Even on the odd chance those phone numbers do somehow end up in the hands of the NSA or whatever the chances of it actually relaying any real information about you is second to none.

    Even then, you can’t assume everyone who uses Signal wants to use e2ee explicitly. Some might just like the app’s style, some might have family members who only use Signal, some might have an ethical problem with corporate apps but aren’t computer-brained enough to know how SimpleX or Jabber or some other obscure alternative works.

    Is the phone number requirement bad? Yes, absolutely. Does that instantly rule out all opportunity for it being a good app, privacy wise? Definitely not.

    Further; privacy should be simple. Signal is designed to be as close to perfect as it can be without compromising too much privacy. They have decided that a phone number is necessary to prevent spam, and to combat the privacy implications of that they have chosen not to block temporary numbers for those who are more concerned.

    Private chat apps are useless if noone knows how to use them. Signal tries to fix that, and I think they’re doing a pretty good job even if it does have it’s pitfalls.





  • The Fediverse is not an app in itself, but rather a collective term for all the services that integrate themselves with the ActivityPub protocol for federation.

    This just means all the apps that talk to each other in a specific way.

    Now, I don’t know anything about Chromebooks or Fire Tablets, but to use Android as an example; I use the app ‘Interstellar’ to use Mbin. Mbin uses ActivityPub, and therefore is part of the fediverse. Also, I use Moshidon to login to my Iceshrimp.NET account. Iceshrimp also uses ActivityPub and therefore is also a Fediverse service even though it is completely different to Mbin, and I can’t log in to Iceshrimp with Interstellar and vice versa.

    If you want to find apps for the Fediverse you should look at the websites and source code repositories’ readme’s to find information about clients. E.G. For Mastodon clients you can check https://joinmastodon.org/apps

    Also, if there are no apps for your platform, almost all services let you just use the browser. Like if you have a Mastodon account on https://defcon.social/ you can just open that link in Firefox. Good luck :)



  • Telegram’s servers are not open source. Telegram’s client is. If you make a back door in a messaging software, you’d want to do it server-side which means the users can’t tell if it’s backdoored as Telegram’s server’s source code is not available.

    Alternatively; Signal’s server code is open source, so if they put a back door in it they’d either have to lie to their users, or publish the back door in their code.