> I currently use Telegram for my friends and family
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AFAIK, Signal does not want anyone to use alternative clients, has that changed?
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Shortcut question: What's a workable federated e2ee solution that's available today?
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In the 1990s US ISPs would "give you" an e-mail account with their service: [email protected]. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.
Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.
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I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now... the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but... as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about "that Linux thing" when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows "Oh, you mean I'd have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?" "Uh, yeah." "Oh, that's more trouble than I think I want, I'll just stick with what I know."
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This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but "the second watershed" can be equated to "jumping the shark" or "enshittification" or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up
The alternative proposed by Illich to "Radical Monopolies" are "Convivial Tools" which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.
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No, the server is on the github account linked above as well. The repo is here.
Signal however doesn't federate and does not generally support third-party clients.
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I'm with you on this, I strongly recall there was some sort of not fully open source portion of Signal at least at one point in time.