We all love XMPP because it’s simple, fast, decentralized, gives you reasonable privacy and, more importantly, freedom. But normies don’t care about your freedumbs, they want a soy messenger with stickers and stories and news channels and a casino in it! So why would a normie switch to XMPP from Telegram, which has all of those soy features? Here’s what I’m proposing to counter this.
Recently some XMPP clients have gotten some soy in them, namely Movim and Monocles Chat now allow you to post something and others to interact with your posts, and I believe there is also some form of “Stories” — that’s the short vertical video microblogs for all you boomers out there. I’ve been suspicious of Monocles for a long time. It always looked to me like soyware, since my very first look at the sticker menu they have added to their client. I don’t like it, but that’s what normies like, and I think some XMPP clients getting soy may make more people consider it as an alternative to all the awful centralized messengers they use nowadays. But I think we can take it a bit further and achieve much better results.
There are two major problems people have with switching messengers:
- Getting used to new UI/UX. For a normie to switch to some app means to change the way he interacts with his chats entirely, so the switching should be as painless as possible.
- Moving all your friends to a new network. Since no messenger is federated like XMPP, you can’t just move servers and still message all of your friends.(Signal and other spyware messengers solve this by tying their contact lists to your phone number, but that’s definitely not what we want in a free network)
So my proposal is:
- Take the mainstream messenger, and replicate it’s UI entirely, so the original client and our copy are indistinguishable from one another.
- Add a seamless XMPP support to it, so the user can add contacts with XMPP addresses, or some other way of switching protocols, I’m not currently settled on the design.
- When the user base is big enough, stop using the messenger’s servers and protocols completely and switch to 100% XMPP.
Telegram is actually a very good fit for this, because the client is almost fully free software and you can just fork it. We’d call it Jabbagram or some other dumb name. But you can also do that with proprietary messengers, although it will require a lot more work. With Telegram we may also shill XMPP mode as some “100% fully encrypted safe mode”, which is very clever, because Telegram has far more users than Signal, but doesn’t have real encryption, and this will give our custom client a big boost in popularity from the privacy nerds.
Genius, I know! And it solves both problems I have described above, and makes the transition so seamless, that normies won’t even suspect they’re using something different until we do the server rug pull, so I think this may actually work.