Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.
If you happen to have Jitsi Meet installed you'll already have an XMPP server up and running to which you can add some configuration to make it useable for this purpose.
Source: this is what I've been doing for many years
I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.
Element (then called riot.im) managed to do text, audio and video calls. The app had some bugs, but nothing that would block me from calling each other. The UX can still be confusing and I have occasional conversations where my father complains he can not hear me, most of them caused by my father not knowing that kept the video call but switched to the internal phone speaker instead of the external one.
I heard about Siskin some months ago. Honestly, I haven't tried it yet. It might be that is fully functional, but the UI is so bare that there is no way that I'll be able to convince my father to switch to it. He still complains that he'd rather use WhatsApp like everyone else, so whatever XMPP brings now will be a case of "too little, too late".
Maybe you can give your father a non-iOS phone if that is what is keeping your experiment from succeeding? We're all on Android here, anything from stock Samsung like my mother uses to self-built LineageOS like I use and we have no problems like you describe. I video-chat daily with my mother without problems, we're using Jitsi Meet (hosted on the same server) for larger video meetings, we've used Nextcloud Talk (also hosted on that server-under-the-stairs) as well but now mostly use Conversations. Telegram also works well for video chat but that is neither self-hosted nor end-to-end encrypted so it is not a real comparison to Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO.
That's a non-starter. He already had Android phones before, never liked them. O have to pick my battles, and getting him to call me Matrix instead of WhatsApp was already enough to call it success.
Besides, my point was less about the specific individual but the systemic issue. iOS is too large of a market segment to ignore, and I can not go around telling everyone "hey, why don't you just drop your shit Apple device and switch to something more open?"
"WhatsApp works fine, I talk to you on there already" (in reality, via a Matrix-WhatsApp bridge)
"Who am i going to talk to on there?" (Me?)
"I don't want to install another app" (but installing ad-laden Viber is fine...)
"I cannot share pictures to Element so I sent it to you through [iOS] Messages" (well, Element removed share capabilities in iOS due to a rare bug)
Simply ignoring messages (their iMessage and calls rings from all connected devices, but Element just notifies once)
I have tried Matrix/Element (self-hosted, of course, like everything else I use) and found it lacking compared to XMPP. It just seems to add needless complexity and does not offer anything worthwhile to compensate for it. I tried some Matrix bridges as well but found these lacking for my purposes.
So the answer to your question is 'I ended up with XMPP'.
With Matrix, I don't need to convince them.
Nice, I'd like to be friends with you. But do you realize that maybe, just maybe, you are facing a bit of availability bias?
Neither seems to provide any sort of conceptual framework to allow the user to react in a reasonable way when something goes wrong with the identity stuff...
OMEMO running over XMPP is pretty terrible for identity stuff, at least for the clients I have encountered.
Why wouldn't you scan the QR code instead of doing that?
In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot.
If you're not in the same location, you can long press the code in Signal and "compare to clipboard".
> In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot.
I think that's a generic remark about this though, that applies to all messengers AFAIK. Whether that's a 4-digit code and 60.
My point is that users should have the chance to know what they are doing. There seems to be a tendency to deliberately keep them in the dark. A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.
> A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.
It's more usable, but that would assume synchronicity (like a TOTP) or something else to be secure, while the 60 digits do not AFAICT. So there's a usability tradeoff. You can't truncate a hash function and assume it's just as safe. They could add more options on top of the current one though.
Overall I think the intersection of pairs of users who:
* want to verify their safety numbers
* have very infrequent physical contacts
* would struggle to use another trusted channel to communicate their safety numbers
is small enough for this not to be a priority for Signal.
If a system is using a 4 digit number for identity verification, chances are it is something like a PAKE[2]. See OTR's (Off The Record) simplified Socialist Millionaire's Protocol for a practical example that allows the use of any string based on shared knowledge.
[1] https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/06/28/202106-hey-signal-gr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr...
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.
iOS simply sucks here and lowering down your pants to marry yourself to the whims of these insane "platforms" if anything most likely reduces your interoperability.
You should be realistic and consider that there is no point to any "E2EE" messaging solution on iOS as _by construction_ all the metadata (at the very least) is going to be leaked to Apple (and they in turn will leak that to the authorities, as was pointed in HN quite recently), precisely by the push notifications crap you'd be forced to adopt as part of the pants lowering requiered to support iOS.
We can be here grandstanding and dismissing other people's choices or we can be pragmatic and find ways to grow the alternative networks to the point where the "mainstream" can no longer ignore it.
If you want to continue using XMPP, great. But those that are on Apple are not going to drop their beloved iDevices just because we are telling them how cool XMPP is. Your inflexibility will do nothing but keep you isolated and able to talk with a handful of other people that are stubborn as you. However, if you let yourself accept that encouraging other people to adopt Matrix will at the same time (a) bring progress to those on iOS and (b) increase the utility of your own XMPP server, as now there will be more people being able to reach you through a bridge.
I have been trying the pragmatic way for over 30 years and it. simply. doesn't. work. The mainstream will drop privacy, federation, and anything in a heartbeat just because the new network comes with a client which can do animated GIFs. There's simply no way to continuously try to match the race of ever-diminishing-usefulness features and if you even try to point that then someone calls you "dismissive and grandstanding".
The only (possible) way forward is legislation. Carrots do not work.
ICQ had animated gifs. MSN had animated gifs. Viber has animated gifs. Telegram has animated gifs.
Why shouldn't people expect animated gifs from any decent messenger? Who are we to police what people should prefer for such a crucial piece of technology?
Could you elaborate? From screenshots it looks like any other chat app and branding isn't offensive.
I'm not saying that I can do better, but I can bet that if you show it to 100 iphone users, 98% would not be interested in having it as their main messenger app.
- Install Conversations on Android - In a prompt, there's a "create an account", I create one (it's with conversations.im) - I have an account - At this point there's a slight confusion between "what discussions are happening" and "what discussions do you know about", but I manage to find a room to a discussion I'm interested in - Get in, see the messages
The experience is definitely 100x nicer
If not for the last point, I'd be using WhatsApp just fine. But because of it, Matrix/Element is currently the best we have. Is it great? Absolutely not, but it is the best we have at the moment, and to call it a "trashfire" without putting things in perspective is a disservice.
I can't say if this is the future, but I like it taking another direction. Taking a few steps back, this model solves a lot of problems with a very easy UX for beginners: shared calendar, shared expenses, shared notes can all happen inside your chat, which is naturally the place where you already share stuff with people, but now it can be more without any server installation or anything.