@nina_kali_nina I've been using #XMPP for the last year or so, wondering if the halcyon ICQ days of yore are still to be had.
After testing it with several friends connecting to my own self-hosted #Prosody server, here's what I found:
- Yes it all works, on all XMPP clients. But MacOS/iPadOS/iOS clients are not all that mature at this time. The #Linux (#Gajim, despite no video or audio calls) and #Android (#Conversations) XMPP clients are the best, IMHO. Always favor those, I say, and they are confidently installable and reliable today.
- Yes, use OMEMO encryption on personal chats. But when it comes to group chats, OMEMO is not necessarily the right move.
- If you don't need privacy in an XMPP group, then don't create a private group, but rather a _public_ group (the safer choice for reliability of message delivery). No OMEMO is possible in a public group, and the messages propagating around will be reliable, even to clients who vanish and re-appear after prolonged absences.
- If you really need OMEMO encryption in a group chat, create a _private_ group, not a public group. **Clients who vanish from the group for prolonged periods may miss out on some of the messages when they return (say, a few weeks later)**.
- I kept a wiki with several more quirks noted, which came up, and felt confusing and frustrating to my (non-geek) friends using XMPP.
As to your Apple-ecosystem-confined friends, at this moment in time, maybe talk to them 1:1 in #Fluffychat/#Matrix, which affords encryption, and is all #OpenSource, like everything above. (Groups in Matrix have a track record of failing for everybody in them very badly every 2 or 3 years or so.)
but it happens quite often, that my wife sends me a list of groceries when I'm walking to the supermarket. This way I'm now able to check, what I have already in my cart so I don't forget anything.
FluffyChat v1.23.0 is here!
