Comment by MattJ100
4 years ago
You missed from your list of alternatives the whole XMPP network. It's a federated model (similar to email/Matrix), self-hostable and there are also public providers.
The XMPP ecosystem is pretty diverse and predominantly open-source.
Personally I'm working on Snikket, which is aiming to be the easiest way to get a group of people onto XMPP (often that's family groups, but also social).
We published a blog post comparing the Signal approach with XMPP/Snikket: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
Looks like this Conversations app doesn't do video calling, which kinda makes it a non-competitor compared to all of the alternatives that already exist.
I'm aware of XMPP and tried it out back in the MSN days along with IRC, but then Telegram came along which promised encryption and a much better user experience and until not so long ago I believed that Telegram would 'any day now' come around to implementing encryption proper (as everything ICT, from WhatsApp that sent plaintext messages over tcp/443 to websites around the world after LetsEncrypt, all turned on proper encryption, I didn't think that this self-proclaimed privacy-focused messenger would stay behind). And so I found myself in late 2018 starting to more and more doubt Telegram, but by then there were many competitors and Matrix seemed to be the hot thing that everyone was excited about (and it turned out that it didn't even work properly after you turned on encryption, only the unencrypted form seems to be somewhat reliable). XMPP didn't come to mind as potentially having evolved, perhaps because in the decade since MSN, I don't think I heard of a single person using XMPP for end-to-end encrypted calls. Perhaps it's great but... somehow I doubt that I never heard of a functional free decentralized/federated end-to-end encrypted multi-device user-friendly chat and (video) calling system.
> Looks like this Conversations app doesn't do video calling, which kinda makes it a non-competitor compared to all of the alternatives that already exist.
Actually it does, and it works well!
Ah, because it's not mentioned in the features. Maybe I should have a closer look at it after all then!
I hope that XMPP or matrix wins out and becomes a de-facto standard that everyone uses (like email) over things like slack, signal, whatsapp, telegram, teams and all the rest.
What I don't get about Snikket is why it tries to distance/hide itself from XMPP. The homepage does not mention it, the app page only mentions it by saying that Snikket is "Compatible" with Conversations which is also compatible with XMPP. The server page does not mention it at all. Is Snikket XMPP and a few XEPs? Is it something else? Can I use a XMPP client with Snikket? Can I use a Snikket client with a XMPP server?
That makes me doubt that Snikket cares about interop with XMPP or the wider ecosystem.
I'd hope that the blog post goes some way towards explaining that.
The ultimate reason is that we're not building something for the 1% of people who know what XMPP is. The protocol used is absolutely irrelevant to most people. Feature set and ease of use matter far more.
For the people who do know what a protocol is, it's not hidden information.
The perspective to have is that the use of XMPP adds features (federation, security, interoperability) but it does not (and should not) define everything Snikket is to end users.
I get that making things understandable to non-techie users is good, but even on pages talking about the server (even on the install guide and the github readme for the server: https://github.com/snikket-im/snikket-server) you don't mention XMPP.
> it does not (and should not) define everything Snikket is to end users.
Does that mean that interop with XMPP is not a feature one should depend on? Is Snikket a XMPP app, a XMPP service, a XMPP fork or is it not XMPP at all despite being based on XMPP software?
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