I have experimented with Simplex, but it feels less tuned toward hosting federated infrastructure and more tuned toward participation with the greater network in a pseudo-anonymous fashion.
Adoption is also always a hurdle with any ecosystem like this, and XMPP is certainly ahead of Simplex in that avenue.
This is great, I have not seen this post before. Thank you for sharing.
You make an excellent point here, that the burden of security and privacy is put on the user, and that means that the other party in which you’re engaged in conversation with can mess it up for the both of you. It’s far from perfect, absolutely. Ideally you can educate those that are willing to chat with you on XMPP and kill two birds with one stone, good E2EE, and security and privacy training for a friend. XMPP doesn’t tick the same box as Signal though, certainly. I still rely heavily on Signal, but that data resides on and transits a lot of things that I don’t control. There’s a time and a place for concerns with both, but I wanted to share my strategy for an internal chat server that also meets some of those privacy and security wickets.
I don’t agree with the notion, but I do agree with the effort because this will 100% help with Linux adoption for some of those on the fence. That is a good thing.