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)
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.
You’re promoting a paradox. On one hand, you say things must be standardized, and on the other hand, you claim XMPP has good privacy. But based on the huge warning about the only encryption protocol XMPP has promoted that is vaguely functional, the privacy has not been standardized at all.
Your stances are incomprehensible from any lens except assuming you’re just hopelessly attached to a dying protocol lol