this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.
I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.
It's worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I'm 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.
XMPP has been the cat's pajamas so far.
maybe the phone number requirement on signal? that would be a dealbreaker if any of them didn't have one
When me and my mates set this up, Signal was only available on phones, not desktops. It also required providing a phone number to a central authority, which some of us were not comfortable doing. With XMPP we got the choice of a large number of clients to pick from. Both the server and the clients were lightweight.
I just had a search maybe you can self host a Signal server, but I did not know that at the time. I wanted to self-host. So that was a reason too, but maybe (?) a false reason. The Signal self hosting situation may be murky. My brief search found some claims that the official app does not support using other servers, and you need a customized app to do it. It might be more self host-able in theory than in practice. XMPP had multiple servers to pick from, and lots of clients.
All those things could balance more toward Signal if your priorities are different, tho.