Messaging apps and infrastructure

Someone thought they were trapped on Signal because they knew of no other secure multi-platform video conference option. So I wanted to take a moment to make it clear that in the free world XMPP has this covered:

• (Linux desktop) Dino
• (Android) Conversations
• (iOS) Monal

From there, I have not experimented with them. Just used Dino for text and file transfers. Feel free to chime in if you’ve tried any of these -- ideally when the other party uses something else. And if anyone knows of MacOS, BSD, or UNIX apps for this use-case that would be interesting to add to the thread as well.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10071857

Had a quick look at Poezio and Libervia while I’ve been using Profanity for a couple years now.

Libervia

• OMEMO is integrated. OMEMO is important enough that it should be a highlighted feature when looking at the pkg description (apt show libervia-backend) not something we dig for.
• It tries to be everything, like having games. That broad focus is a bit worrying because so many comms apps screw up at just exchanging e2ee messages that you really don’t want other things competing for maintenance effort. But OTOH it could be quite useful that the backend can interface with a mail client like mutt. And has an activitypub gateway which could have some interesting obscure uses.
• Docs are in a quite bad state. Man page references broken URLs and the websites that are up point to other broken links. The page with content is https://goffi.org/ and it’s got some bizarre problem where it tries to refresh the screen every few seconds. Really hard to read when it keeps refreshing. /usr/share/docs/libervia-* is also useless. References to broken URLs there too as well as mentions of non-existent files. Docs say to run the daemon you need to execute eval [tic]dbus-launch --sh-syntax[tic], which is baffling as it does not actually refer to the libervia backend. There must be more to it than that.
• Man page makes no mention of a proxy option.
• It’s a good design to have a backend and different frontends that can connect to it, generally, but the lack of proxy option complicates that. If the backend has to run on torsocks, will the frontends be able to connect to it locally?

Poezio

• Well packaged and documented. /usr/share/docs includes an HTML tree of well presented docs. Really seems well organised.
• Bit alarming and unconventional that when you launch it that it automatically connects to servers even if you never supply a server to connect to. Security feels like an after-thought. I had to run it in a firejail sandbox first just to make sure it generated the config file that I could modify before putting it to use. Docs say the connection it tries to make is “anonymous”, but they use that term overly loosely. There is no mention of Tor. I want to be in control of what connections are made and it’s a bit off that a sandbox is needed to force it to run offline.
• There is no proxy config option. So unless it looks at undocumented env vars, it should be run on Torsocks.
• OMEMO is not built-in. There is a separate OMEMO plugin out in the wild, not packaged on Debian. That’s not ideal for Debian users because we have to wonder what quality standards did the plugin not satisfy, and the fact that upgrades can break part of the pkg when only part of the tool chain is in the official repos.

So I think these two apps need to evolve more. Profanity has issues but it seems I’m better off trying to struggle through those.

PGP email in the 1990s was so much more reliable and usable. It’s bizarre how in 2024 e2ee comms have become such a shit show. Most people are using tech giants and not encrypting, which is exactly what the tech giants want. I will not, so I’m out of reach to most people. I won’t touch Signal either because that’s garbage. Maybe Delta chat is worth a look since it claims to do PGP over email in a way that normies can deal with.

I hate to link into MS Github but that’s where the Kalium project exists. It’s intended for API testing, but among proficient users it should possibly be the primary way to use the #Wire network because:

• WireApp (on Android) is a forced obsolescence shit show
• WireApp (desktop) has been a shit show from day one (based on Electron/Chromium) plus a fuckup just caused it to block logins for Linux users.

So Kalium seems to be a lesser of evils. But I must say it was a shit show too when I tried to get it running a year or so ago.

Has anyone successfully gotten #Kalium to run?