How have others gotten friends/family to make the switch? I’ve been doing a cleanup of my digital life over the last year or so and am trying to move to using more privacy friendly alternatives where possible.
example: I’d love to switch to Signal only but everyone I know only uses WhatsApp. I’ve mentioned switching to people in the past but it’s always the same response (I don’t have anything to hide)
How regularly should I check if Signal has become an interoperable internet standard?
Privacy does not necessarily mean interoperability. XMPP is trapped in the past because it cannot roll out changes, including privacy enhancements that Signal has delivered
Sorry but I’ve been burned by WhatsApp before. Not wasting time on moving my contacts to another walled garden again. XMPP is actively developed and has most privacy features Signal does + most providers don’t require a phone number and let you connect over Tor. Doing things properly and in an interoperable way takes more time but is absolutely worth it: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
Why are you listing lack of an identifier as a positive, when complaining you couldn’t move between two platforms that use the same identifier? It’s much harder to convert people to a system where the functionality and features are scatter shot.
And I prefer a product that exists to a high minded notion of what could exist. Like I said earlier, how often should I check in to see when 2016’s end-to-end encryption is formally adopted? Or even when it enters Draft status?
You can check how often you want, it’s not going to affect anyone. Please don’t check more than 5 times a second maybe.
I’ll check biennially. And if I remember and still am using this account, I’ll tag you to celebrate a decade without an encryption standard, which is the future I predict
Great. I’ll check if Signal is compatible with any internet standards too. I’ll tag you to celebrate a decade without interoperability.
This is the Privacy community, not the virtue community. If you genuinely cared about implementation above all else, then Matrix runs circles around XMPP in terms of solid implementation of end-to-end encryption, so I’m not sure what your point is other than defending a piece of software that is pretty much dead in the water.
Interoperability and standardization is not just a virtue, it is a necessary condition for sustainability. Unlike Signal, modern XMPP implementations have great privacy properties AND great sustainability properties.
Matrix is a much better choice than Signal since it offers provider choice, but I wouldn’t be sure it’s any better than XMPP in terms of usability or sustainability:
You care a lot about standardization of OMEMO, yet you don’t apply the same to Signal which contributes exactly nothing to any standards body.
I care about privacy. OMEMO is just the closest thing XMPP has to it, and it’s still stagnant