> for encryption fans, I've been wondering for a long time now: why would you trust ANY 3rd party with your so sensitive data instead of running your own service? Are you not aware of OMEMO for XMPP?
we ran our own XMPP server for over 10 years using the "off the record" plugin for end to end encryption. Development seem to basically stop on open chat clients a few years ago and everything started getting crufty. (I see Pidgin dev has apparently picked back up again to some extent, as has Adium, to a much lesser extent).
"off the record" mostly worked ok, between Pidgin users, but failed with other clients.
A couple of OMEMO plugins came along but making them work (and keeping them working) was a continual drain - and we're only a small team with only 2 operating systems (Linux and OSX)!
My hunch is that enough people just moved to things like Whatsapp and Slack etc that developers were no longer using chat clients they could hack on. People stopped being able to scratch their itches.
Not to mention lack of any/decent XMPP client support for syncing histories between multiple clients, or handling inline images and things. All that modern stuff people expect.
Things like Mattersmost tried to fit in here but we just didn't get along with them.
Eventually Element/Matrix matured enough and while it was far from perfect, it worked and we sadly finally gave up on XMPP.
For the past two years; I've been using Conversations (Android), Dino (Linux), and friends of mine have been using Gajim (Windows), Monal/Siskin (iOS).
All of these work fine with OMEMO (the iOS ones gained better OMEMO and push support in the past few months) and message history retrieval between clients. Gajim doesn't do inline images, but the rest do.
I occasionally use profanity as a console client and that recently had message archive support land in Git.
So, yeah, no idea what you mean by developers giving up - if anything, the ecosystem has greatly improved (minus group OMEMO on iOS).
Maybe not developers in general, but development of Pidgin certainly stalled, which is why I stopped using it. Too man features not implrmnted in XMPP and no working support for e.g. Skype.
I didn't say developers "gave up", but even as of 2019 it didn't seem like things were moving forward in any meaningful way.
Even just for OMEMO support, we all had to compile a plugin for libpurple/Pidgin, and it didn't even have full UI support so was very difficult to use when things didn't work automatically.
We used a gajim but iirc, to get OMEMO support we had to compile that too.
But I'm truly glad to hear the ecosystem has improved - I would have much preferred to have stuck with XMPP. But in 2019/2020, Matrix offered all this and more and worked very well. It was impossible to make the case for us to stay on XMPP.
I use Conversations and Dino daily, they're awesome. When I'm stuck on MacOS or iOS I use BeagleIM and ChatSecure, though Monal looks a little more slick...maybe I should try that.
There are a few options yet for XMPP clients, I have some hope for the ecosystem...!
we ran our own XMPP server for over 10 years using the "off the record" plugin for end to end encryption. Development seem to basically stop on open chat clients a few years ago and everything started getting crufty. (I see Pidgin dev has apparently picked back up again to some extent, as has Adium, to a much lesser extent).
"off the record" mostly worked ok, between Pidgin users, but failed with other clients.
A couple of OMEMO plugins came along but making them work (and keeping them working) was a continual drain - and we're only a small team with only 2 operating systems (Linux and OSX)!
My hunch is that enough people just moved to things like Whatsapp and Slack etc that developers were no longer using chat clients they could hack on. People stopped being able to scratch their itches.
Not to mention lack of any/decent XMPP client support for syncing histories between multiple clients, or handling inline images and things. All that modern stuff people expect.
Things like Mattersmost tried to fit in here but we just didn't get along with them.
Eventually Element/Matrix matured enough and while it was far from perfect, it worked and we sadly finally gave up on XMPP.