Signal kind of… Well. What do you fellow lemmings use? I am interested in you.
Specifically open source?
I will use IRC until my last dying breath, both libera.chat for public chats and one on a tildes server for a smaller community of computer weirdos (weird in the best way possible).
I use matrix for things like Ubuntu Studio community chat which have given up on IRC because it’s “not popular” or whatever ;) I used to strongly dislike matrix, but now that I’ve put the recovery key in my password manager, I only mildly dislike it.
For non-open source, I’m still on Google messages (gross) for RCS/MMS/SMS, Signal for cool people and my therapist (I guess shes cool too—the only person I’ve successfully brought to signal), Bluebubbles for my family who all have iDevices, Discord for work social chat, Slack for the one makerspace who uses it, and email…
Things I’ve successfully distanced from after using a lot:
- WhatsApp. This is a challenge because a lot of cool group chats in my IRL community are here.
- FB messenger. I still have friends on Facebook. Or I should say, people I’ve lost touch with are still on Facebook.
- IG: I log into this account once every 6mo or so to contact people that I only have on here.
Trying to get people to use signal. People don’t care about ideals or principles or future problems, so it’s a difficult sell.
I’m using Molly, the hardened fork of Signal that doesn’t use any google services these days. GrapheneOS introduced it via their app store…called App Store.
Everyone I know except my immediate family uses Signal at least to talk to me.
Signal, i know its now perfect, but its easy to get normal folks over there. I’m just happy I don’t have to use WhatsApp anymore.
I wish more people would move to Matrix with me, so far only my partner did. But that’s good enough.
Did you self host it find a community?
No, I chose a public server with decent connection speed. I was lazy. 👻
Signal.
I’ve really tried matrix. it’s clearly the good one. Used to use telegram.
Now I’m mostly working on getting my friends over on signal. it’s just barely mainstream enough.
Depends on the purpose.
Signal for private conversation.
Mastodon for my hobby.
Lemmy and Bluesky for participation in the world.
Didn’t realize Blueaky was open source. Cool.
SchildiChat + Element (Matrix)
I’ve used matrix for years but now moved to Xmpp and simplex
Xmpp only works on highspeed mobile data… Or is that my clients fault?
I’ve not encountered that issue. For reference I’m using prosody self-hosted and monocles on android (dino on Linux)
Email, usually thunderbird or k9 these days. For online chat I have a small nextcloud server but I rarely use it for that.
Monocles chat for the xmpp network. I managed my family to finally leave WhatsApp behind with it. It even has support for mini apps inside. Everything is completely open source.
