I am really struggling to replace facebook messenger / whatsapp for a few casual conversations. My friends and I are all wanting to move away. We are not heavy users of this but need it to work. I think the requirements are:
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floss client for android, linux, windows
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persistent history across devices
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reasonable security
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don’t need to self host server
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can send a message to offline user, they get it when they come online
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not tied to or reliant on phone number / cell service
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ETA: end user documentation explaining how to set up and common troubleshooting
tried:
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matrix: the thing with having to keep track of room keys and stuff is too complicated. every time someone uses a new device it is a ton of issues and we could never quite get it ironed out
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signal: tied to phone number, no history across devices
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xmpp: similar to matrix the key situation is confusing, also no cross device history
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ETA: simpleX: a lot of people here are mentioning simpleX. It didn’t come up in previous investigations so will give it a shot.
- ETA 2: It doesn’t seem to have persistent history across devices. Clarification?
I actually didn’t think this would be such a problem but it is breaking us. we don’t need a lot of sophisticated features like voice, video, moderation, 1000s of participants, spam protection etc that seem to be of concern to the projects. just simple text chat.
Please don’t tell me you only tried Pidgin 🤦♂️
Of course there is cross device history on xmpp. And what “key situation”? Its all automatic.
pidgin, gadjim, chatty, dino, kaiden, psi, psi+… some other ones
it isn’t automatic from what I have found. vague “omemo”-related errors are popping up here and there.
what set up do you suggest where the experience is simple? it seems that there are a bunch of standards which servers and clients have varying support for. plus there is a plugin architecture for lot of them which extends or changes functionality, or it matters what version of libraries were used in compilation, and many other little details.
I believe that some people do have a seamless experience but ours hasn’t been. If there is some sort of documentation describing exactly how to get going I would appreciate it.
Well you can try https://snikket.org which packages a Prosody server with suitable clients and it all should just work ™. They also offer a hosted version.
On https://joinjabber.org you can also find recommended clients and servers that should work without problems.
But to be honest, none of the issues you describe are actually real in my experience. Yes you read them everywhere from badly informed online pundits, but if you use a modern xmpp client with a modern xmpp server it all just works without issues and e2ee keys are automatically exchanged on first message without any problem.
There are some vastly outdated clients like Pidgin that do cause issues, but it is a bit unfair to blame that on xmpp, when Pidgin has not updated their xmpp implementation for more than 10 years 🙄