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)
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
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
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 take for granted the opinion that xmpp is best because it got here first. As I’ve demonstrated, that means it’s falling apart and less likely to be adopted over time, not more likely. Your complaints about Matrix also clash with your supposed virtue of wanting interoperability overall; at what point did the company behind it start mattering to you?
I’m not even sure what you’re arguing for. It’s not interoperability, it’s not privacy… is this just the end result of the sunk cost fallacy?
It doesn’t clash at all. If startups keep re-inventing the wheel just to have shiny things to sell investors on we end up with fragmentation which is terrible for interoperability. For example it’s impossible to send an encrypted message to a Matrix user using any XMPP client, since Matrix bridges can’t handle end-to-end encryption. Why? Because the company behind Matrix just had to cook up their own protocol instead of building on (and thus improving) existing internet standards. This is bad for interoperability and privacy.
You also seem to have trouble understanding that there can be multiple factors at play, not just a single one. I’m not arguing just privacy or just interoperability, but a combination. XMPP performs well in both while Signal performs slightly better in the first one while completely failing the second one.