The only downside (for many) to using super secure messengers is that they do not require any e-mail address or phone number to register, so the net result often is you have no idea if some of your contacts join later, and they won’t see you either.
For XMPP Quicksy allows you to create a separate account on their service with your phone number (if you wish to) and in this way you can be alerted if any contacts join via the Quicksy service. This account is completely separate from your day-to-day XMPP account (or you could use it for day-to-day if you wanted to make your phone number known).
It is a fully functional fork of the Conversations app for Android. They explain the privacy policy and data storage policy at the link below. For normal XMPP usage though with existing contacts you have, there is no need to ever advertise your phone number or e-mail address. This is really ONLY intended for those who want to be found by their contacts, and I’d still recommend that you have, and use, a separate XMPP account for your daily usage. Of course if your contacts don’t know about Quicksy, or don’t use it, you still won’t know they are out there on XMPP. If you know your contacts’ XMPP ID’s there is also no need to use Quicksy at all.
#technology #opensource #XMPP #securemessenger #quicksy
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Even if you are not a Quicksy user you can enter your Jabber ID into the Quicksy Directory and give Quicksy users the ability to automatically discover you based on your phone number. This lets you enjoy the privacy-friendly, federated nature of Jabber/XMPP while giving your less tech-savvy friends a low barrier entry into that world.
We charge a small fee to enter your Jabber ID and phone number into our directory. This cross financing allows us to make Quicksy completely free for its users. If you are a paying customer of the conversations.im hosting service, you can enter your number for free.
This could also be interesting. After all, to me there are two hurdles to mass adoption of federated services: lack of instances/pods/serveurs that are stable in the very long run and discoverability of your contacts. Thats is something that WhatsApp really got: if you are going to use a mobile tchat app you probably want all your phone contacts to automatically get added. Quicksy is really just implementing the WhatsApp model and letting you communicate with Jabber.
I don’t know if it will take off, Google Play Store is giving 5k+ downloads but since WhatsApp private policy announcement the dev said on his twitter +30% new accounts.
Yes glad to see all alternative social media and messenger sites are experiencing a jump in users. Back in the day Facebook users could also communicate with XMPP. XMPP actually underlies a lot of services that people don’t realise its there, apparently even including Whatsapp.
I suppose for those who want to be found, we’ll see more use of generic ID services or pods (like Sir Tim Berners-Lee) where you identify yourself and can say where else you can be found.
Didn’t know that Facebook used XMPP. I remember Google Talk used to federate with other XMPP clients as well.
Yes correct I remember Google Talk on XMPP. INteresting how these Big Tech lured users in with open XMPP and then later just shut it off to prevent users easily moving out and keeping contact with their friends whoi stay behind. It’s actually quiote devious now that I come to think of it. We did not really notice it as an issue because most people were inside Facebook and Google back then. Facebook has removed their quiet announcement now but it is visible still at the Watback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20180320012841/https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat. I must actually do a post about this as everyone has forgotten about this.
Yeah, I had no idea about Facebook. It is of course the whole “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” idea I suppose. I have no idea what the licence what licence is jabber but maybe that was the “problem”.
Jabber / XMPP the protocol is an open proptocol andone can use freely. Cisco’s Jabber client si a different story.
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Yes that’s easy with those couple that you know but when you have a few hundred on your phone it’s just not possible as some you don’t contact for months or even years. This account is separate though from your day-to-day XMPP account, so no access is granted to it. In fact once setup and created, you could just add it to your main XMPP app as a secondary account and let it idle in case someone contacts you.
The biggest downside, or impracticality, is that it still would need those few hundred contacts to actually register on it, which is actually not very likely either.
Whilst XMPP is a great service and can be more secure, it could struggle with mass adoption if contacts are not seeing each other. A bit of a Catch-22 and affects any secure service that does not use a phone number to register.
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Only a fraction of my 800 contacts on my phone will probably pop up on XMPP but it’s nice to re-establish contact. Traditional sites like Facebook used to be easy to make contact again but on XMPP basically you can’t “find” anyone unless you know their JID. So the few that do pop up on XMPP would be nice to keep in contact with. But no few of my contacts know each other so there is not much grapevine to pass anything along.
Yes that’s easy with those couple that you know but when you have a few hundred on your phone it’s just not possible as some you don’t contact for months or even years
I think you are missing the fact why so many people use WhatsApp. I am on multiple group chats because that’s how people communicate. I don’t have them all in my contact list necessarily but using the phone number and automatically adding them in WhatsApp is what is really interesting about WhatsApp.
With the change of ToS I’m starting to see friends poping up on Signal and the fact that this is automatic just makes it much easier.
Quicksy achieves the same effect. You register once and it checks agaisnt your contacts when new contacts also register at Quicksy . Similar effect just that contacts do need to register at Quicksy. Thing is XMPP Is decentralised across servers so any decntralised service has the issue of discoverablity. This was an attempt at solving that.
Yes, that’s why the direcory could be good.
