Comment by pgeorgi
7 years ago
I'm running a "beta test" of sorts of XMPP+OMEMA with non-technical people in my circles, and while Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS) are getting there, there are still functionality and compatibility gaps.
Gajim is a usable client for desktops, but it's certainly picky about which users it is friendly with (that is, I can't recommend it to non-technical folks).
On the other hand "it uses IDs like email" is a concept my friends could understand, and the promise of end-to-end encryption over a server I control (as compared to some faceless organization somewhere else) was appealing to them.
And so I'm first level support for my peers and report issues upstream in the hope of improving the ecosystem.
And while it's closer to an email replacement (in that it avoids the ID issues of the WhatsApp clones and provides multiple clients for different purposes), it's still only a complement to email due to the ephemeral nature of messages, not a replacement.
As far as usable desktop XMPP+OMEMO clients go, Dino is much friendlier to non-technical users, but paradoxically, it's only available on Unix-like OSes. It runs on WSL and is probably buildable for X on MacOS, but by that point, you've lost non-technical users in both cases.
Wow, that one looks good. Thanks for the pointer!
I wonder how much is in there that precludes cross-compiling to Windows.