How do you feel about registering in XMPP by phone number?
How do you feel about registering in XMPP by phone number?
Recently, the Prav app was released in F-droid. In this application, registration is by phone number.
What do you think about this?
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Good question! Your perspective on that might differ a lot depending on how long you've been on the internet.
In recent years, every major messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, ...) has been doing it this way, linking your phone number to your identity, so your contacts are automatically discovered from your address book (and reciprocally, people who have your phone number already will find you easily and as soon as they install the app you recommended to them). If that's all you've ever known, not only is that not a bug (or rather, a major privacy and identity linkage breach), that's a convenient feature, and you kind of expect things to work that way. I personally don't like that (and I'm aware of being a dying species).Now, regarding Prav, please don't use it (for the time being, at least). As far as I can tell, this is a fork of the Conversations/quicksy.im XMPP clients (Conversations being the original work, and Quicksy being a derivative by the same author using the phone number discovery / easy onboarding approach discussed here). Unlike the original which is very safe and reputable, whose author is known and very active within the XMPP/security communities, and whose hosted service has years and years of excellent service and uptime under its belt, this one comes out of nowhere, from an unknown contributor (afaict), has no funding model to suggest it being sustainable, and worse, no rationale as to why it exists in the first place (why would it be chosen over the original). So, my recommendation is to stick to those.
Back to the original question, thanks to Quicksy.im having been around for several long years already, the debate of having phone numbers being used for identification on XMPP is not really something new. Having been there for a very long time and seen the before/after, indeed this has enabled some of my current contacts (who were already users of other services like WhatsApp and certainly didn't mind) to get on board a bit more easily. They are not the majority, so, and in all, I'm glad that the option exists, it's not as big a deal as it might seem for XMPP in general.
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I am one of the people behind prav app. I would like to clarify some points:
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Prav is just another XMPP client and service so people uncomfortable with sharing phone number can choose any other XMPP app and service
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We are in the process of registering a cooperative in India and funding will be through transparent user subscriptions. We are currently in beta.
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- People behind Prav have experience of running public XMPP services for a decade (at poddery.com), and some more people joined later. I have written a blog post on how the project came to be https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/backstory-behind-prav-app-project/ . You can also see people behind the team https://prav.app/about and credits section https://prav.app/credits .
@u_tamtam @Slow I'm part of Prav team and I have been promoting XMPP and #FreeSoftware for many years. I'm a long time Debian Developer and maintains gitlab in Debian. I'm part of the community maintaining many services to public including XMPP services at diasp.in and poddery.com Prav is just trying a different approach to running an XMPP service. Both poddery.com and diasp.in is fully volunteer driven and we are finding it difficult to get new volunteers.
@u_tamtam @Slow Also we have been working on Prav for over 2 years already gathering members required to register a coop in India. We need 50 members from two states to register a multi state cooperative and we are very close to that number. We are in process of finalizing bye-laws and will be registering soon. At Prav, we are happy if new people learn about Quicksy and XMPP through us even if they don't join Prav.
Let ask few questions:
Will the app UI change?
Is there anything you can do to prevent the "This app tracks and reports your activity" warning in F-droid?
And the question related to the SMS processing center. Is the service located in India?
- We already include some patches from cheogram to support message moderation and we are waiting for conversations v3 redesign (we hope to include that too). We are planning some more changes like allowing custom username instead of phone number.
- @aryak says that will be soon changed to tethered to a single service warning.
- Currently we are using twilio, which is not based in India and we are considering options based in India (which is cheaper).
Praveen - u_tamtam mentioned what I have been thinking about Prav - what's the rationale for it to exist and why should I choose it over the original?
/Of course, I appreciate the work you and the other volunteers are doing to spread the awareness of XMPP, Privacy, and Security (in India).
@Deus another Prav volunteer here. If you need to ask about choosing it over the original, you're probably better off with the original 😅
The personal motivation behind Prav was similar to Quicksy: to get friends onto XMPP when they're too impatient to learn how it all works :xmpp:
We realised it helps to be running the service ourselves, and to be able to modify the app as our users request (which can of course be propagated upstream if there is interest) 🛠️
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To all the prav folks responding here, sorry if my message came up rubbing the wrong way, I didn't mean to be diminutive or dismissive in any way. I am glad to see my questions answered, and I guess prav makes sense in the specific context that was mentioned. I only wish it was a little bit more explicit about what it is, what it is not, and whom it targets. I wish you good luck with your project :)