I really dislike people recommending Signal in a post about free software since Signal has a pretty bad track record when it comes to allowing non official clients to connect to its network. So much for user freedom.
Users are free to host their signal servers if they choose. The usage of their network is their prerogative. It's not a federated protocol and they never promised or set out to support arbitrary clients on their network. At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.
> At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.
Matrix/Riot is superior in about every way to Signal, and they welcome third party clients without any restriction.
> What sort of weird FOSS zealotry is this where you want to use someone else's network resources without their consent
Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden? Because this is precisely what they seem to be doing by creating such restrictions.
I edited that statement since it was unnecessarily aggressive. In any case, I can see their point. They never claimed to create a federated service and they cannot reasonably be expected to support/vouch for every arbitrary fork on their network. i.e., Vouching to the other party about the security of the communications, which is their main point.
>Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden?
They are in the business of accessible secure communications for everyone. I think that's a reasonable goal with their reasonable tradeoffs. It's a free service with no money, no ads, and no obligations. Respecting their network usage policy is really just common courtesy.
Most people haven't even heard of https://jami.net/discover/ ... and that's the problem with messengers - you have to educate your social network and coax them to use the same product or you will be forever stuck with Facebook Messenger / WhatApp, iMessage et al.
Riot.im and the broader Matrix ecosystem are doing pretty well. Matrix was even adopted by the French government for internal communications.
I tried Jami when it was called Ring and I couldn't figure it out after some fumbling with the app and skimming of the website. If I can't figure it out how can I expect nontechnical people to? That was one of the reasons why I ended up adopting Riot/Matrix back then and have been pushing it since, but I'm still interested in alternative communication systems if they can bring any benefits to the table. Does Jami bring any?
My problem with Riot specifically and Matrix generally is that the adoption process isn't very gentle. Yes they have bridges, but my experience has been that they're way more pain than they're worth, especially if you're the odd one out.
The thing I like about Signal is that I can use it for regular texts as well as encrypted communications. Instead of converting all of my friends at once (or even just a significant subset), I can just replace my texting app with Signal and get my friends to move over one as a time.
I tried that with Riot, but it just didn't work out. I tried the Slack bridge, but it required admin access on the Slack server (fortunately I had that at the time) and only one channel could be created at a time, which was tedious. That's not Riot's fault, but it's not particularly important who is at fault.
I want to replace some app with Riot and slowly phase everything else in, but nothing really gave me the confidence to do so. I heard rumors that they were planning to support VoIP, but this doesn't seem to extend to making/receiving regular calls or texts, but merely providing audio and video chat along with their regular text service. Maybe that has changed (I check back periodically), but unless it solves a problem that doesn't require me to convince everyone else to switch, I'm probably not going to make the effort.
And that's why I like Signal. It's not the best secure messaging system out there, but it's a drop in replacement for something I use today and doesn't require me to get everyone to switch at once.
I presume they meant that the app sends a normal unencrypted message to clients without Signal. (The user is clearly informed when this will happen). This means you can use Signal as your default SMS app and as your friends start adopting Signal, you'll automatically start sending encrypted messages. It's how I'm using it and appreciate it.
How does Jami compare to Wire and Riot? My friends and I are comparing various apps right now and trying to figure out which has the best usability and fit for ourselves.
You're conflating free software with free as in "I shouldn't have to pay for anything", in a way. The Signal client is FOSS, but the folks who develop signal are in no way obligated to provide resources for people to use it if they do not want. I'm not aware of any FOSS license which says "we have to allow anyone to use our resources to run forks of our software"
