messaging madness
Earlier this year I wrote a post called “email madness” about the generally alarming increase in the number of emails I receive per year. I was thinking about producing one of those posts again this year when a friend shared this post on XMPP (aka. Jabber) and IRC.
I’ve been on IRC for approximately a year and a half. I dabbled when I was a kid, but the ocean of networks was too vast, the waves of channels too deep, and the riptide of conversation flow (or lack thereof) too strong. I didn’t really spend much time on chat programs when I was in high school, just a little on LiveJournal.
Flash forward to 2020, I use:
- Signal. Which I know is Problematic.
- IRC: Four different networks and Bitlbee (connecting via my IRC client) for Discord, Slack, and XMPP (without OMEMO)1
- XMPP (Jabber)2 with OMEMO encryption
- WhatsApp (yes, I know)
- iMessages/SMS
- Briar (well, I have it installed, at least)
Oh and there’s also shit like Franz which is just a modified chromium browser that runs the web versions of several tragically popular services (Slack/Office365/etc). Just open a seperate browser window ffs.
Just as an exercise, here’s the number of people i talk to on a regular basis on each platform
| Platform | ‘Core’ People | Others |
|---|---|---|
| Signal | 8 | ~20 |
| IRC | 5 | ~15 |
| Discord (via IRC) | 1 | 0 |
| Slack (via IRC) | 3 | eh |
| XMPP | 4 | 0 |
| 2 | 0 | |
| iMessages/SMS | 2 | everybody else I guess? |
| Briar | 0 | 0 |
IRC people being people I trade direct messages with.
To put it another way…
-
Bitlbee’s XMPP Module doesn’t support OMEMO encryption but instead supports OTR message encryption. OTR is kinda shit in comparison. OTOH when you’re on a server you control talking to another person on a server they control, the message is encrypted server to server. Unless the server is compromised, the message is functionally secure without OMEMO or OTR. ↩︎
-
how bad is your marketing that most people still call ‘XMPP’ ‘Jabber?’ Or don’t know what you mean until you say ‘Jabber?’ ↩︎