[kwlug-disc] Cross Platform Messaging Clients

[Jason Locklin]

On 12/05/16 10:52 PM, Bob Jonkman wrote:
> Many services (Hangouts, Whatsapp, probably Signal) use a
> proprietary variation of XMPP for communicating. Might as well be
> completely proprietary -- a perfect example of commercial
> corporations using Free Software libraries and code but not
> returning new development back to the community.

We should probably differentiate between proprietary and
non-federated. Signal is open source, but does not federate with other
services, so both parties have to be using Signal's servers to
communicate (otherwise, it drops back to standard SMS messaging). You
can run your own signal server, but then only people using your
customized client, connecting to *your* server, can chat with each
other. Moxie wrote a long screed recently about his dislike for
federated systems:
https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

I don't agree with most of what he says, but there is one kernel of
truth: *Multi-protocol apps like Pidgin are less necessary in mobile
space.* Modern, single-signon systems mean that you can you can make
use of multiple messaging or social networking apps without
maintaining multiple accounts and identities. You can have a single,
unified, notification screen and contact list on your device. Push
messaging means that all those apps do *not* need to be sitting,
running in the background on your device, eating ram/cpu/data/battery.
They only need to be started when you receive a message.

Pidgin and the like have always been a bit of an unstable mess with
all the constantly changing, underlying protocols that they need to
support (that said, I do still use Bitlbee for XMPP, Twitter, and
Facebook). At this point, I'm leaning toward just using dedicated apps
for whatever system I need. However, to anyone thinking Moxie is right
about the stagnation of federated XMPP in the mobile space, do some
reading over at the Chatsecure blog (https://chatsecure.org/blog) or
try out Coversations.im (free on Fdroid). Signal is almost boring
compared to some of the ideas they are fleshing out.

> The long and short of it is: You gotta use the client and protocol
> of the people you're communicating with. As with all things in the
> Free Software world, I would steer them to open standards and Free
> Software clients. To that end I use XMPP, with Pidgin on my
> desktop, Xabber on my phone, and I run my own Prosody server which
> provides XMPP services.

As usual, we agree in the end. -J