In theory, I agree, but in practice, I have used #Ring, the earlier version of #Jami. The experience was so poor that I can no longer get my in-person contacts to try anything that is not #Facebook / #Instagram / #Zoom. And that's without ever trying the #videochat functionality ... we only used text chats and it was still a really poor experience.
I've heard it got better, but of course, none of my in-person contacts will try it again. This also affects apps like #Briar and #Session.
@lxo Unless the people using #Jami are pretty advanced, they won’t like it. Having to be online at the same time, difficulties trying to use the same ID on multiple devices, those are things that most people will not tolerate.
Maybe they have fixed some issues since I last tried to use it, but it was unpleasant to use during and shortly after the GNU #Ring days.
@geniusmusing @lxo This is important. #GNU #Jami used to only send when both parties were online simultaneously. If the parties in the conversation are in different timezones, that may not happen often.
Users reasonably want end-to-end encryption (E2EE), but still want some basic usability.
(The experience back in the GNU #Ring days was pretty bad. Even today, none of my contacts will reconsider it.)
Likewise, I’ve pretty much abandoned #Jami (or #Ring, if you used it previously) because all my contacts dumped it years back when an update forced everyone to re-add their contacts.
But I don't object to others choosing such end-to-end encrypted messengers over messaging apps such as (for example) #Facebook_Messenger.
I personally use #Wire, #XMPP, #Matrix, and #WickrMe. (I tried #Jami, but it wasn't very usable yet; none of my contacts were willing to try #Tox or #Briar.) I've even considered getting a Google account again so I can use whatever their latest incarnation of messaging is (just because almost everyone I know has a Google account).
It does bother me that Signal and Telegram and most other messaging services are centralized and non-federated.
It seems we haven't learned from the 1990s & early 2000s when some friends had AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), some had MSN Messenger, some had Yahoo Messenger, some had ICQ, and a few had various other walled garden messengers (such as Excite's messenger). If I wanted to talk with all my friends, I needed to have accounts on every possible service. I should be able to communicate with my friends from whatever service I choose to use to whatever services they choose to use and not have to create accounts on every possible service.
But that's a matter of educating our friends and family, not of dogmatically refusing to communicate with them on any service they might use.
@hambibleibt the biggest problem with #Tox from a #UX POV is the fragmentation across OS platforms. Apps for some OS have group chat, while others don't. Anyone could develop an app compatible with the protocol set #Jami uses, but the dev team has an app for each major OS, and features roll out across all of them at the same time. Jami also seems to progress steadily, while Tox dev seems to have been in hibernation for some time.
@rek2 you left out #Jami, which has a much more consistent #UX across platforms than #Tox (eg none of the Tox mobile apps I've tried support group chat). You also left out #BigBlueButton, which I keep hearing is much less of a resource hog on the server-side than #JitsiMeet, and I can confirm JM is a massive resource hog on the client-side. I haven't used #Discord but I've heard #Riot (#Matrix client) is a pretty good substitute?
Experience with #Jami's ancestor #Ring tells me that it needs a fairly technical user who is willing to tolerate some annoying deficiencies. My contacts have all dropped it, including one son who is a network engineer.
Be careful about promoting it to people who are not willing to endure those things, or we can chase people away from all non-Facebook communications software.
I wonder if people are aware of GNU Jami, a P2P solution. https://jami.net/
Jami has end-to-end encryption while Jitsi is only encrypted during transit. The Jitsi server has your packets available in unencrypted form. If you can't trust a Jitsi server and need end-to-end encryption, Jami can be a good alternative.
@strypey So there's a lot to unpack in that document. The #Session onion routing protocol involves using a #blockchain called #Loki to make it difficult for an adversary to control a significant fraction of the nodes and prevent exposing the IP addresses (and therefore identities) of a user and his/her contacts to the same person or group. (As you noticed, Session is not yet using onion requests.)
There's also swarms and attachments and message storage (including attachments), online vs offline messages, multiple device support, spam resistance, a modified version of #Signal's encryption protocol, group chats (3-500 member "closed" groups are end-to-end encrypted like the rest of Session; "open" groups are not, and require an account on a special group server [self-hostable])
Note that all this stuff happens under the covers. It seems that Session will handle most of it without the user ever seeing it. I'm going to query some family members and see whether any would be willing to try this as a secondary channel (for now #Wire is our primary channel). Just adding offline messages is a clear advantage over #Jami, but the lack of audio & video chats is going to limit its usefulness.
Thanks. This is a tough one. #Wire is the first and only privacy-centric tool that is in widespread use among my friends and family. Several of them tried #Ring (now #Jami) before that, but it was a bad experience all around and cries of "it got better" won't get anyone to try it.
@mmin I think there is a variation of #ZookoTriangle here. Out-of-the-box, Riot is decentralized and user-friendly, but not encrypted. Turn on encryption, it's still decentralized, but not user-friendly. Same is true of #Jami, #Tox clients, and every other decentralized chat app I've tested that has encryption out-of-the-box, #UX hell. All the user-friendly systems I've seen that have encryption turned on out-of-the-box are centralized ones like Signal and Wire. @lnxw48a1