No. Use Nostr for that, since it’s already overrun by crypto-bros over there.

If you’d rather avoid registering, you could try Movim instead, which just needs a username and password to use, no email required during sign-up.

It’s open-source and GPL licensed. There are no restrictions if you self-host, the subscription only applies if you use an account on the main server, which pays for development and hosting costs of the main server.

Ah, my bad. Thanks for letting me know! Edited my other comment to reflect that.

From what I understand, Piefed instances will have better support for Mastodon posts, and I believe it supports subscribing to Peertube channels already (something that Lemmy still doesn’t support…) Edit: It does support Peertube!

This article is confirming the extreme merit of Citizen Controlled Media, which has only become more and more important as an essential form of prefiguration as time goes on, since these alternative citizen controlled sources become virtually the only way to communicate truth to others that is otherwise censored in state or corporate controlled media.

Related to Movim; it just received Discord-like spaces a couple days ago! So it’s now a pretty effective decentralized Discord that can do group audio/video calls, screen share, and even has blogging built in.

Highly recommend anyone thinking about ditching Discord to give it a shot. It doesn’t even require an email to use, just a username and password :)

Especially with the Movim client :)

No prob ^^

Lemmyverse.net is a very useful site to find communities that may not have federated to your instance yet (at least 1 user on your instance must be subscribed to it for it to begin federating). Especially useful for smaller instances.

I can’t really find anywhere that clarifies what version of OMEMO that Movim is currently using, but if I had to guess it would be 0.3.0.

However, I want to point out that the creator of that linked blog actually removed a response in the comments from an OMEMO developer which clarified some things (you can it read here), which personally I think was rather odd/bad faith of them to do.

According to that response, there’s nothing really wrong with OMEMO 0.3.0, as the OMEMO developer considers it a stable standard that clients can safely implement, and the newer versions basically being public beta releases toward a stable ‘OMEMO 2’ standard that can eventually replace 0.3.0.

I also think the blog author’s argument should be put into perspective; from most security expert’s POV (including the blog author linked), any app that allows encryption to be disabled is considered flawed or insecure compared to the gold standard of always on E2EE. This would rule out Matrix, XMPP, and certainly any other Discord replacement like Fluxer or Stoat (which offer no encryption). Ultimately only Signal, Deltachat or similar app would be the only options a security expert could recommend, as those experts are prioritizing security above all, regardless of use-case, needs, or practical threat level.

Signal is centralized and requires a phone number (deal-breaker for me), where as Deltachat is decentralized and does not. Deltachat is a fantastic messenger, but it is only a good replacement for Signal, not Discord. Nor are any of the other ‘encrypted by default with no option to disable’ messengers.

If we contrast Movim with optional OMEMO against Discord (which is not only entirely unencrypted, but also actively working with authorities and spying on you); Movim is a monumental improvement while still (eventually) providing Discord-like features. No other possible Discord replacement comes close besides Matrix (which has its own problems, more than XMPP I would say).

I would suggest that for the average user, XMPP with OMEMO 0.3.0 is pretty darn good. It’ll certainly provide very good privacy for encrypted DMs to your friends or groups where it’s enabled, and no nosy server owner or relay server will be able to read or decrypt them.

For people where security is absolutely paramount, and they believe they may be specifically targeted by a state actor, then they should probably stick with an E2EE always-enabled platform like Deltachat.

But for most, who likely isn’t even using a VPN, or Tor, or may even still be using Windows or a non-grapheneOS phone? XMPP with OMEMO 0.3.0 is going to more than suffice.

And as time goes on, that new ‘OMEMO 2’ will become stable, and the clients can then migrate to that. But it’s already the best privacy respecting Discord alternative we’ve got (IMO), and it’ll likely only get better :)

But mo :)

Only if you need to screenshare with audio! And only because that feature was just implemented (Firefox uses a different mechanism to screenshare with audio, and likely requires its own implementation). Movim works fine otherwise in Firefox or Librewolf.

And remember, Discord itself is just an Electron app, which is literally just a stripped down Chromium browser without the browser controls, but is also itself spyware. Running Movim in a de-googled chromium is a huge step up, and running it in Firefox even more so. I think it’s important not to make perfect be the enemy of good, in this case :)

While there are forks of conversations (Cheogram & Monocles), Movim is not a fork, AFAIK. Did you read it was somewhere?

Ah, good to know! :p

It’s technically possible that native Movim apps could be built in the future, but it’d probably be a bit too much for the dev to tackle without additional help.

The other clients can interact with each other without any special actions, similar to how Lemmy and Piefed users can. And you can use 1 XMPP account and log into any client, and it will retain your contacts and message history across them all. However:

• A Conversations user wouldn’t be able to join any group audio/video calls with Movim/Dino users, since it can only do 1-on-1 calls at the moment. It could still call individual Movim/Dino users with video.
• Dino is fully compatible with Movim’s group audio/video calls, but AFAIK it cannot initiate screensharing yet.

If a Conversations user wanted to message a user currently using Movim, they would just need to add their username as a contact (Something@YourXMPPhost[.]com, just like Lemmy works), and the Movim user would get a notification just like they would if it’d come from a Movim user, and they can begin chatting or initiate a 1-on-1 call.

XMPP and Deltachat are federated (though not with each other). A person can self-host a server that can communicate with any other XMPP or Deltachat instance.

That’s not a terribly good user experience if a user doesn’t want to interact with or see any comments from users of a particular instance, as then it would require the user to manually block hundreds of users over a long span of time.

User level community and instance blocks will stop you from seeing posts from those places, but it does not block their users or their comments, so you’d still be able to see them around in non-blocked communities.

The Dbzer0 folk also run a piefed instance, Anarchist.nexus, if you’d prefer to be using piefed with everything else the same.