Others are noting clients & servers matter. This isn’t a downside—it’s just that the protocol is flexible & extensible for many types of messaging beyond human2human private conversations, which explains why encryption isn’t a requirement for the clients. With that said any modern client targeting said H2H interaction will have basic forms of encryption like PGP, OTR, & OMEMO which all do the job of E2EE. OMEMO is based on the same ideas that Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, & so on use so that part is all the same.

A unique feature for XMPP in this space tho is how low-spec & resource-unintensive the servers/clients are—you aren’t chewing up a ton of CPU or RAM, there is no eventual consistency to balloon storage (MAM is enough), clients don’t drain your battery or take literal minutes to sync with servers. Since it is low-cost, it is feasible to self-host XMPP from a residential server (at home on some old hardware for instance) or add it to a multipurpose machine where it doesn’t get in the way of other processes/storage. Some of the other service often mentioned here either you can’t self-host or are quite expensive to run (often by design) which limits the accessibility causing centralization as well as requiring trust in that server you don’t own.

Last with a headphone jack on the flagship while still allowing bootloader unlocking too. This is why I picked one up last year.

Folks literally have no conept anymore that you can just slap HTML on a page. & with the advent of needing TLS, it starts to become more technical than a lot of folks want to bother learning & maintain versus the days of raw FTP uploads.

There are so many gaming options that do run well on Linux that I just don’t bother with with those that don’t. More fish in the sea…

Yet the Molly fork supports UnifiedPush so I can reuse my connection with mf XMPP server to deliver notification from a server I control. Folks have asked for UnifiedPush or MQTT as an alternative to having multiple persistent socket connections open on your device, but Signal doesn’t seem to care.

Seems more a rejects of the flamboyance of the prior two generation which will certainly give it a different feel. It absolutely felt fresh at the time of inception.

Signal & WhatsApp are not secure enough. Meta/Facebook regularly give data & metatadata to the cops & Signal is centralized & not self-hosted by your crew so while messages are encrypted, the metadata still isn’t. If you must use Signal, I would pick Molly as an Android client since you can a) encrypt the messages under a separate password for storage on seizure & b) you can use the UnifiedPush version to make sure your notification metadata isn’t going thru Google’s Firebase servers. Protests are the ideal place for Briar as it is works via mesh net so internet & SIM cards are not required (but years ago wden I tried it, the app was a major battery drainer).

Letting Cloudflare centralize the internet isn’t always the solution. I’m sick of hCAPTCHAs just for living in a non-Western country.

Want to contribute to this open project? Create closed Microsoft GitHub & Discord account. https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html

Unfortunately given the stalemate of the mobile duopoly & service providers like banks thinking attestation is okay & what you run on your hardware is their business, Linux phones will have a hell of an uphill battle to take on. Wild to me is hearing the average Joe is happy their phones now don’t let them do whatever they want & they like the attestation since they don’t trust themselves with operating the device. These are the masses that will obviously be catered to, but maybe eventually be the only ones supported as banking websites age with little maintenance & receive no feature parity.

XMPP MUCs, IRC, some Matrix Spaces. Lobsters, Mastodon.

I refuse Discord. I really wish I could refuse Microsoft GitHub—source code doesn’t need to be a proprietary social media plaform.

Most of the language servers can run with Vim, Neovim, Helix, Kakoune, or Emacs as you noted. You could run VS Codium if you’re the “Tech Conservative”, but ultimately if you’re going all the way to “Tech Paranoid”, you won’t touch VS Code or Codium knowing Microsoft is steering the ship with another EEE plot in mind. It’s all a part of that package with Microsoft™ GitHub® + Codespaces® + Copilot® trying to vendor lock-in the developer experience into the platform.