Comment by 🐙 norayr
Re: "I'm considering making an account on either Matrix, Delta…"
one more thing that was well designed: prevention of man in the middle attack.
i have heard a story of someone's grandmother: she would take the landline phone and talk to friends of her daughter presenting herself as the daughter. their voices were sounding similar and friends would not know.
how do we know we talk to someone? well they are authorized to the server.
but nowadays we do e2ee, so we also encrypt for them. so we need their public key to encrypt for them.
with contemporary clients like dino and conversations you can share your public key and account via qr code.
or you can read someone's qr code with a camera.
or you can verify it manually and set as trusted.
then if someone else figures out password of your contact and writes to you, your client will indicate it.
if they use e2ee, your 'conversations' app with default configuration will accept it, but warn you: 'blindly trusted new public key from...' - so you know your contact is connected from a new device.
the incoming encrypted messages will be marked with a closed lock, not shield.
some paranoids forbid blindly trusting keys and manually review always.
May 04 · 3 days ago
3 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · May 04 at 15:09:
I would agree that XMPP is the superior protocol here because it is fully open. It is to instant messaging what email is to electronic mail. It's a protocol not a platform. I remember using prodigy mail back in the day before they were on the internet and you could send messages to anybody using prodigy mail. It was platform vs protocol.
I use XMPP and Matrix. They both work fine. If you want to join, the first thing I'd ask is what your friends use, because you should use that one. Second, if you're self-hosting, XMPP demands much less (and lets you handle video separately, when you're ready).
I currently host a Matrix homeserver (and an IRC server, but that's a bit out of scope). I haven't used Delta Chat or XMPP, but I've liked Matrix so far. It's a bit quirky at times - sometimes interactions take a long time to process - but the protocol works relatively well with the Cinny client.
I also like that Matrix is federated, so I can host my own homeserver for low latency with other local users in my community while still being able to visit other popular spaces with users outside of my server.
Original Post
I'm considering making an account on either Matrix, Delta Chat, or an XMPP server, and I'd like to get some opinions from my fellow Geminauts. Which do you use, and why? Have you used more than one of these services, and if so, how do they compare to each other? What programs and apps do you use to access them? What account providers do you recommend, or do you self-host?