Post by @riverpunk@defcon.social

2026-07-27 10:49 UTC

Question for the community. How's y'all's experience with various Instant Messaging services? I don't use discord except with some of my friends, and I'm trying to get away, as it seems to be going the way of enshittification. I've used Matrix before, and I'm aware of some of the technical annoyances as a user. Does it tend to have good community (like, among gay nerdy Mastodon folks at least?). What about the other options, like XMPP clients, or like Delta Chat or something? I believe I've even heard (i might be wrong) that IRC 3 allows for asynchronous texting, so you don't have to be online in order to keep receiving messages that you can read later? Is this a thing? Everytime I look this up, I can't find any good info one way or the other. Even if there's no community, I'm curious what y'all think has the potential to become a somewhat ubiquitous technology among folks on Fedi? I wanna see more Instant Messaging online in these spaces. #askFedi #texting #discord #xmpp #irc #matrix #element #instantMessaging #software

Replies (5)

@michaelharley@infosec.exchange 2026-07-27 11:20

@riverpunk@defcon.social The challenge for me is finding something my friends and family will actually join me on. We've landed on Signal. It's better than some others but I wish I could convince them to use XMPP with me (I'd self host snikket and invite them). Normies don't see the point though. Most have heard of Signal at least but even still, some just prefer their iMessage and just don't care about anything else.

Open ##4135593
@craftxbox@transfur.social 2026-07-27 11:34

@riverpunk@defcon.social You're thinking of IRCv3 draft/chathistory, which is still in its infancy for development & adoption. Few public networks support it yet, though you can pretty trivially set up a private network if you're technically inclined. I would generally recommend XMPP as suitable for one-to-one/groupchat messaging & i've had good experience with the Monocles client for Android, and it can work well for voice calling too but I'm not sure of the state of video calling or screenshare.

Open ##5191569
@QuadRadical@wetdry.world 2026-07-27 12:34

@riverpunk@defcon.social personally Matrix is by far my favorite, and yes it does have a lot of those nerdy communities :)

Open ##5191570
@anakin78z@mograph.social 2026-07-27 13:05

@riverpunk@defcon.social I just switched to XMPP using Snikket. My biggest ask was reliability, because we were having a number of issues with Nextcloud Talk, and so far XMPP has been super reliable. I had asked people on Lemmy about a reliable service, so you can check out that thread if you want, though it's more focused on self hosting: https://lemmy.world/post/49675638

Open ##5191572
@movim@piaille.fr 2026-07-29 10:33

@riverpunk@defcon.social 👀

Open ##5191574