Honestly, we just need a drop dead simple chat client/server that can be self hosted and may be eventually extended via wireguard/tailscale networks and MagicDNS.
XMPP, again and again. But that's not a solution, because the problem is absolutely not technical.
Telegram is great for other no privacy related stuff as bots, channels and groups.
I'd rather recommend Briar [1] which is really end to end encrypted, and works even offline via bluetooth or Wi-Fi LAN.
(Of course, it did so roughly as we finally qualified for the nonprofit Slack plan, so it was a bit too late to have a real advantage - but it's an option now where it wasn't before.)
Copied from last "This week in Matrix":
- Another big thing in Synapse 1.69 is experimental support for faster remote room joins!
- The new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composer is available in Labs soon; It’s in active development and we’ll be adding more functionality soon.
- Notifications research is near conclusion; We trawled hundreds of GitHub issues, discussions, looked at competitors and interviewed some users. We’re really excited to bring improvements to your experience.
- Threads is making great progress and we’re hoping you’ll start seeing these improvements in the next few weeks! Keep your eyes open for updates.
There's no way for you to avoid SPOFs for notifications on Apple devices, because APNS is designed so that the only way you can wake up an app to talk to an API is via notifications sent from the developer of that app.
This means that if the APNS servers go down (unlikely), or that the vector.im notification relay servers go down, nobody using Element on iOS gets any notifications.
It also means that vector.im sees all of the notification events (who got notified when), though I don't believe they see the notification content. The notifications (I speculate) are simply app wakeup events that make the app then contact the homeserver to see what it has new.
We're keeping one alive with friends, not because we need it, but because we can and it's easy to do so.
We can argue matrix has not the most fancyful clients right now, and it might not be a perfect solution for everybody, however there are many clients to choose from, you can write one easily with many support libraries, it's easy to script, you can have full control.
This is what we should push for. I've recommended signal to a lot of friends, and I currently feel stupid for doing so: It was a hurdle to convince them, and what I achieved was to move some to another privately run network with arbitrary rules and mandated software controlled by a single entity which is now starting to do random crap.
No, this is not a question, this is an answer. At this point, XMPP is not a solution, but a basis for an actual coherent solution to be built on, but it does not exist yet (or anymore).
Matrix is also only a partial answer, because in practice you will direct users to matrix.org, and that makes matrix.org not a single point of failure, but still a huge point of failure and matrix will be down for most people if matrix.org goes down.
Open source, doesn't require a phone number, and a big strength is that it's decentralized, which makes it much less vulnerable to outages like this.
"Session utilises the decentralised Oxen Service Node Network to store and route messages. This means that unlike P2P messaging applications you can message Session users when they are offline. This network consists of community operated nodes which are stationed all over the world. Service nodes are organised into collections of small co-operative groups called swarms.
Swarms offer additional redundancy and message delivery guarantees even if some service nodes become unreachable. By using this network, Session doesn’t have a central point of failure, and Session’s creators have no capacity to collect or store personal information about people using the app"
> Oxen blockchain and the $OXEN privacy token
Btw, the whole idea of "no phone numbers" makes it really hard to spread. It basically means you can't send a message to anyone in your address book that already has Session installed, unless you get his Session username by other means.
Also, by doing that and letting the account existence be publicly known, anyone with their phone number will know that they have an account on that service and lets you try to contact them. That can range from privacy violation to life-in-danger situations.
Everyone I message with is via iMessage or Signal nowadays and I only have WhatsApp because I am part of a few sports clubs which have a WhatsApp group but we don't chat enough for me to notice a downtime like today.
Makes me happy to see how I've actually managed to rid myself of WhatsApp for the most part.
iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire.
For the normal person this matters less of course, intelligence services are not interested in your nudes.
Would be great if you provide a source for that.
In some countries WhatsApp is used by almost everyone. I wonder how much all those free users cost Meta each year. Just as a side thought :)
There really is no technical reason to use Whatsapp anymore
Though for my closest friends and family we still have Signal as backup.
Sounds like a nice way to test new notification settings before putting them into production. Now go and apply them ;)
IP networks have much more reach than the PSTN these days. It's not 1995.
shrug
EDIT: Support answered with generic mail on what to do if problems registering device... eh, whatever.
