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   ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 16:19:30 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

   • lynn

   @ariadne @lynn and yet Element manages to be clunkier than most XMPP chat apps I tried

   I stopped using XMPP because there was no E2E encryption, no history replication over multiple devices (hell, *just* using multiple devices was broken af), and file transfer was so broken I still remember that bzip2|base64 starts with Qlp...

   in 2015 it was a shit protocol with moderately ok clients. then the last person i knew who used XMPP switched to Telegram

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 16:22:18 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • lynn

     @lynn @ariadne last time I reviewed whether XMPP's E2EE was something I should use the answer was "definitely no" https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/, at which point I stopped caring because without good E2EE it becomes "Telegram with worse UI"

   • Embed this notice
     lynn (lynn@raru.re)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 16:22:21 JST lynn

     in reply to

     @whitequark @ariadne good thing all of those things are fixed by literally all recent clients/servers

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 16:25:44 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • lynn

     @lynn @ariadne Element is one of the worst applications I use on a daily basis, made by people who seem to be incompetent at the job. nothing that I say should be understood as endorsement of Element, which I viscerally hate and only use because of network effects

   • Embed this notice
     lynn (lynn@raru.re)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 16:25:46 JST lynn

     in reply to

     @whitequark @ariadne also Element has never worked longer than an hour for me. it bricks itself and loops trying to open a chat that it thinks "doesnt exist" despite me making it

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 17:55:52 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • ARGVMI~1.PIF
     • lynn

     @argv_minus_one @ariadne @lynn I used OTR with XMPP in 2010s very extensively. it was so easy to downgrade in practice due to fragile implementations that I don't think it had protected much of anything at all

   • Embed this notice
     ARGVMI~1.PIF (argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Saturday, 13-Dec-2025 17:55:53 JST ARGVMI~1.PIF

     in reply to

     • lynn

     @whitequark

     XMPP definitely had E2EE in 2015. Not OMEMO, but it did have OTR and OpenPGP.

     The lack of forward secrecy is extra scary for a private chat app, so it was certainly not ideal. But it wasn't nothing.

     @ariadne @lynn