None of my friends really use linux so I mostly use whatsapp but xmpp looks great.
When the lockdown began and online classes became a thing I finally started to use my dad's old laptop instead of my phone for the hours upon hours of google meet and zoom classes.
Slowly but surely my frustration grew as the old i3 system with 4gigs of ram struggled with lags and screen tearing and more with just 2 tabs of chrome open.
As most of my work were done in a browser it didn't matter what platform or operating system I used. Since I could remember using ubuntu back on my school it lab I thought why not try linux. Fast forward to now 3+ years later and I use arch btw.
With the use of linux I got exposed to many communities that preach foss and digital safety and security. I was able to get most of my frequent contacts to switch from whatsapp to signal and fewer still to matrix.
Although I'd heard of xmpp I didn't try to look more into it because of how old the tech was.
A linux community friend told me about an xmpp app his senior built and asked me to try it out.
2 things I noticed straight from the get go
- Instant messaging that actually felt instant
- Flawless call quality despite being on cellullar data and not wifi.
I feel genuinely shocked and wonder why matrix even exists at this point. Well now begins my eternal struggle to try and get my people onboard.
Well I guess it is what it is.
Ah, a fellow Arch user! It really gives you a sense of control and it's the closest bet in terms of adjusting nearly every piece of software to your hardware without spending hours compiling programs.
While I never laid my hands on XMPP, I did make the bold switch to P2P chat services. My best friend made the switch, as well, though I did end up losing contact to most of my acquaintances and old friends, which I don't nearly mind as much as I initially assumed. It works for us and I no longer bother with people choosing maximum convenience over friendships.
Hello ~alex this is completely off-topic but im smitten with the yellow rose you have in your about me page. Could you tell me how you added that? I tried adding asci art and it didn't change colour and couldn't find help in the documentation.
Yellow? Fascinating. I logged out of my account to figure out what you mean and my rose doesn't show up as yellow. I accessed Midnight via two Gemini browsers (Lagrange and Amfora) and my ASCII rose is never yellow. It's rather beige when I'm logged in due to a custom theme I set up on my side only, so you shouldn't be able to see any of that.
Then I realized that my brain is exceptionally slow today.
Is it possible that you forgot to add three backticks (`) one line above and three backticks one line below your ASCII art? Your art simply may not be rendered as pre-formatted text, which appears in a different color than normal text.
Arch has struck a balance for me. I like how light the iso is and the constant updates and software availability means I can get my hands on most software I want. The community aspect was also a big part of my decision to keep using it.
XMPP is quite good and I would recommend giving it a shot.
Right now I keep whatsapp and instagram to chat with most of the normal crowd.
Signal for my frequent contacts, close friends and some family, matrix and xmpp for my fellow linux friends and irc for the novelty.
Haven't tried p2p messengers a whole lot but the ones I did just didn't fit my usecase.
Hello,
may I ask, which p2p system you chose?
While far from being the best solution and us only settling with it after RetroShare wasn't working on my friend's side, I went with Tox. I wouldn't recommend it to the radical paranoid who's aware that the protocol still hasn't undergone a proper audit and also no longer offers many actively-maintained clients, however it's enough for our use case.
It's quite sad that P2P nowadays mostly means some Crypto-nonsense. Classic P2P chats went out of fashion in favor of Discord and other client-server services (that may or may not be routed through Tor, which... I personally trust even less).
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all you need ... is an IP and the port they're listening on!
Sure. But this is quite a tall order in my opinion. I'm living behind an IP address, which changes daily. I don't want my routers IP address be accessible under a known name (think dyndns). I don't want my router to allow any connections initiated from the internet. I don't want to poke holes into that. Plus uplink speed is so low, that you don't want to run anything substantial from this IP address.
So? Well, not all is lost. I have a hidden onion service running. I can access it only through TOR and only if I provide some extra bit which authorizes me to connect to this service. This way, the connection is really initiated from my router to the TOR guardian node. This hidden onion service provides ssh access to a specific machine, iff I can provide the associated ssh keys. This could work for a chat server too, provided all participants pre-share some key material.
That is my opinion, however, I don't feel entitled to give out proper advice.
can't comment on XMPP because i haven't tried it yet but i definitely can comment on linux; i've used alpine for a few years and i've got to say, it blew my mind when i first tried it. i went from windows to that (and in the meantime debian, elementary, openbsd and netbsd, etc.) and man am i glad i switched...
I've heard good things about alpine myself. Might try it later over the holidays. My journey was from Windows xp to 8 to 10 and after that to Ubuntu, Pop Os, Endeavour, Archcraft and finally Arch.
My friend has been egging me on to try elementary and debian but i think i'll stick with arch or arch based distros for personal use.
What would you say is the best part about alpine?
the simplicity and therefore reliability. the only crashes or incidents were caused by me; i can't say that about any other operating system i've used, even OpenBSD. i love BSDs because they are always simple and reliable, but alpine never fails. ever. granted, i'm a moderate user (not a power user) so if you're like me you'll never run into a problem. the only quirk that isn't detrimental is musl libc; *some* programs don't run but tbh if you can't run it on alpine nowadays, you probably should look for an alternative because that means it's some sort of hyperspecific nvidia thing or whatever.
alpine is the openbsd of linux, and can run on every hardware i've tried (unlike openbsd)