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Comment by Phenix88be | Hacker News Reader

XMPP is nice, but I have never see regular folks use it. Only tech peoples. The fact that you can't "install and go" is killing decentralized solution because when you ask regular folks the "server url" (or even to choose on a server list), they give up because it's too complicated already.

It's already HARD enough to get them on Signal because they can't just click on the "Connect with Facebook" button. I got my mom on Signal and she actually converted other people to use it because it was not much harder than Whatsapp to set up.

XMPP nerver killed MSN back in the day's for the same reason...

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We're smoothing onboarding (e.g. choose a server) with things like easy invitations: https://blog.prosody.im/great-invitations/

Support for creating invitations from within the app was recently added to Conversations (sponsored by the Snikket project). I'm hoping to see more servers deploy this functionality in the coming year, and more clients implement support.

Snikket is built around the idea of invite-first for onboarding onto self-hosted servers. As the dev I may be biased, but I've onboarded many people seamlessly this way.

I use XMPP with "regular folks". At least on Android it works well to point someone to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli... and that's it.

do you also use encryption with "regular folks" and verify each others devices?

YES !

first it automatically trust the devices but if you want you can improve it with manual verification :

https://gultsch.de/trust.html

"TLDR: Automatically trust all new devices of contacts that haven’t been verified before, and prompt for manual confirmation each time a verified contact adds a new device."

That's the cool thing with Threema. If you verifyed the contact is so prominent, everybody want to verify each others key, even people who don't understand the concept. In Threema it is not hidden somewhere, it's just allways visible on each single contact with green or red dots.

Sounds similar to Element. However, Threema does not yet have the problem of having to deal with verification with multiple devices, (which is what I was aiming at)

Quicksy is the onboarding app we need for XMPP but until we have a perfect like for like Quicksy also available on iOS (like Element has) I can't in good conscience recommend my social circles join.

A few years ago, many regular folks were probably using it without even realizing it: Google Talk and AIM both had XMPP support and thanks to that, communication between the two platforms was possible.

The only value add of the "Connect with Facebook" button is identity provision.

I mean, surely there's a decent XMPP web client out there you could use with OAuth.

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