this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Privacy

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Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.

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Edit: Matrix isn't going freemium, it's introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver. Thank you for the corrections in the comments.

~~Matrix is going freemium~~ Matrix is introducing premium accounts and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual "time to leave [app]" threads.

Users don't care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn't be a problem.

Meanwhile, I've heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.

Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?

If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?

If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?

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[โ€“] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

E2E is possible, but problematic (in that it's not simply just "on").

That's just not true. All XMPP clients have support OTR out of the box for probably 15 years.

[โ€“] LWD@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago

OTR is a janky kind of encryption that doesn't have a modern analogue any more. It requires both (or all?) participants to be connected to each other simultaneously in order for messaging to work.

With mobile devices, this is very bad.

It's also not doing great:

XEP-0364: Current Off-the-Record Messaging Usage

WARNING: This document has been automatically Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state....

It's also one of three different encryption standards...