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.

        • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
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          7 hours ago

          If you avoid technical stuff a lot of people are pretty understanding of not having socials. Instagrsm ks HITLER NOW! Everyone jokes abt it. Way I do it is I just post hiking photos on Insta and other stuff. In order to avoid booting it up yourself, it can be automated with IFTTT (proprietary but so are the datamining services you use it to reach so who care??). Problem is being responsive to notifs but I just check half of them every other day so people don’t think you died and hit like

          • TurkeyDurkey@piefed.worldOP
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            7 hours ago

            Yeah people have been talking (real life) about their breaks from it and thoughts on leaving the social media sludge whenever I say I don’t use that stuff. It’s refreshing, but I still reject sharing my number except for work and maybe a baddie every now and then. Wish I didn’t even need to pay for one even for how cheap it is.

            • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
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              7 hours ago

              You know if Movim really takes off I admit that would be amazing because it’s like a hardened facebook. Public photo albums are important to people

              • TurkeyDurkey@piefed.worldOP
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                6 hours ago

                Any good mobile apps? I’d love to have a place to share updates with my friends like social media does. Integrated with XMPP makes it all the better I’d say.

                • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
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                  6 hours ago

                  They’re just in browser at the moment, but it’s very flexible since you can login to instances with XMPP accounts elsewhere. It’s under pretty active development although TBQH I find the Povoq guy difficult 😂

            • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
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              7 hours ago

              I try to get people to add me on musicbrainz and link up music services to it. It’s cool bc you can funnel music player program listens, funkwhale (which is activitypub!), scloud, spotify, yt music, apple, all of their ʜᴏᴛ ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ right, but it still works with open source shit. It can absorb lastfm which a lot of ppl have hanging around. None of this solves the reality of being at an information disadvantage vs someone who plays weird games with IG likes. But are people like that worth the stress anyways??

              But if you get each other’s music recs and can dm realistically what else do you need? Am i boring? Lol

              • TurkeyDurkey@piefed.worldOP
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                6 hours ago

                Right? Although I’d love to communicate with everybody in my community and be reachable on the ready, do I really want to give up my values for people who don’t care to understand them? If you wanna contact me outside of face to face, then use what I use. And it goes for the other way around too. Not worth the stress.