On iPhone, I recommend Monal.

Monal comes close.

nlnet is the main one that comes to mind.

How much money do you donate?

I am very privileged to have some money left over after fulfilling essential needs. So, I set a fixed amount a while ago, and then whenever I am able to make a saving (e.g. switching to a cheaper phone plan) or get a pay rise (if it ever comes), I’ll put some of the gains into donations.

When do you donate?

I remember reading somewhere that many organisations prefer regular donations to one-off donations, even if the regular amount is smaller, since it helps them plan better. So I always give regular donations, even if the amount is smaller to compensate.

I have everything set up as automatic donations in liberapay and OpenCollective. So, it’s pretty seamless!

If anyone ever wants to gift me anything, I’ll ask for them to consider a donation to a project instead.

Do you have a minimum donation amount?

I try to avoid payments under £5. Below that point, way too much of the money goes to fees. For some projects where I donate a small amount, I donate yearly instead of monthly instead.

How do you decide what projects to support? Do you forego donations if you’ve contributed in other ways?

I don’t donate to every project I benefit from, but I care a lot about XMPP and Linux on Mobile, so I donate mainly to projects in these areas. I’ve also contributed code to some of these projects, but I keep donating as I want to support the ongoing maintenance as well as just individual features.

Do you donate to all equally or do you have some sort of ranking? Is it by amount of use, subjective preference, something else?

I care about XMPP as a whole succeeding, so I donate to many projects I don’t even use myself. I wanted to donate to clients and servers for each major platform, so I split the clients like this:

• iOS clients: 1 project
• Android clients: 1 project
• Linux clients: 4 projects
• Server software: 1 project

Then, I donated an equal amount to each platform (so, for example all the Linux clients combined would get the same as the single Android client).

However, since I was donating so little to each Linux client, I decided to gradually increase the amount I donate to those over time.

I’ve also recently started donating to libraries / ancillary projects in the same space. But I don’t have much money left to play with for them, so the amount is smaller :(

Linux on Mobile is simpler as I only donate to two projects, so I just donate equally to both.

So, long story short, it started with some kind of structure, but has become more subjective since then :)

What platforms do you prefer using? Liberapay, Opencollective, Patreon, ko-fi, Paypal, Monero, actual post?

I really like liberapay, especially as it mostly works without Javascript. But Opencollective is pretty nice too. If the developer themselves gives a preference, I’ll normally use that platform.

One thing I’m interesting in knowing is - do people generally prefer donating to fewer projects, but with bigger amounts, or vice versa? One criticism of my approach is that, because I am spread quite thin, I risk not really helping any project that much, whereas if I focused on one or two projects, at least those could benefit a bit more.

To be honest, I think the above clients and services like Snikket fit that description.

Now, I wouldn’t say they’re all on the same level UX-wise as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. But I do think they are 90%-95% of the way there, and in my experience that’s enough to convince friends and family to switch over.

In my experience, when people haven’t wanted to switch, it’s normally not been because of the clients, but because they don’t want to install yet another app to talk to someone.

Any new open source software is always a net positive.

But, there are a few small caveats (depending on how cynical/cautious you are):

• Because Proton are not accepting contributions, they own all the copyright, so can make the code closed source again if they want to (that wouldn’t affect the already released versions, but future versions)
• They could likely take down any derivative on iOS, since Apple will always take instruction from the copyright holder, for GPL’d code
• Since the builds are not reproducible, there’s no guarantee that the binaries they distribute are built from the source code

How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:

• Android: Conversations
• iOS / MacOS: Monal
• Linux: Dino
• Windows: Gajim

Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

They have also funded a lot of improvements to XMPP clients and servers.

I’d like to second Snikket - it’s designed for this use case and is very simple to set up.

If you’d rather not use Snikket, check out these recommendations for clients and servers.

Hope it works for you! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Different strokes for different folks! I’ve been fortunate enough that many of my family and friends have been happy enough to follow me.

But I don’t disagree with you, Signal has a much more recognisable brand and better user experience. These are things that we need to improve if we’re going to get anywhere near the level of adoption Signal has.

How I Got a Truly Anonymous XMPP Account:

• Open my client (e.g. Conversations, Monal, Dino)
• Pick a random server, username and password
• Click register

Sorry, it’s a cheap joke, but it still baffles me that Signal requires a phone number, so I felt I had to post it :)

Of course, this is not XMPP-specific either, just my protocol of choice, there are many other open alternatives that also offer such functionality.

Agreed completely!

I think there are two main schools of thought - one is to buy linux-first mobile devices, and the other is to make linux work on android devices people already have.

At the moment, linux on android devices is in a better state. From what I read, calls, battery, suspend etc. generally works well on the OnePlus 6/6T and Pocophone F1.

For the linux-first approach, I’m very fortunate to have both a PinePhone Pro and Librem 5. They are both improving, and I’ve been daily driving one or the other for a couple of years, but they do still involve some sacrifice. I’m not sure they’re ready for “regular people” yet, but they keep getting better.

Personally, apart from buying the devices themselves, I prefer to contribute directly to the projects focusing on the software. I feel you can’t go wrong supporting PostmarketOS and Mobian. They are doing heroic jobs and have come a huge way in a few short years. Because they work upstream-first, any benefits one achieves are shared with everyone else in the ecosystem. And any benefits apply just as well to the linux-first phones as to the ones that originally ran android.

It’s a long mountain to climb, but we’ve seen with Linux on the desktop that, over a period of years, things do get better. You used to have to pick your hardware carefully to get Linux installed. Now, you can install it pretty much anywhere, and most likely everything will work.

I feel eventually, the hardest problem in getting people to switch will be that proprietary apps won’t work well. I think all we can do is to improve our free software alternatives to the existing ones, especially those with network effects like chat apps, as much as we can.

Every small step we can take is an important one. It’s easier to get people to switch to Linux if they already use free software, as free software often does a better job targeting Linux than proprietary software does. Meanwhile, it’s easier to get people to switch to free software if they run Linux, as that’s the path of least resistance on that OS.

My fear is that they will start off by applying this to Messenger, WhatsApp etc. Then, in a few years, when criminals and tech-savvy people move to XMPP etc, they will say “the laws aren’t working, we need to apply it at the OS level instead”, and since iOS and Android have a big market share it’s very easy for them to do it. At that point, trying to communicate with friends becomes very hard. It’s one thing to get them to switch apps, but asking them to switch phone or OS is a whole other hurdle.

I’m trying to contribute both code and money to make XMPP, and mobile linux as good as possible before that can happen. I feel we need to buy time, by delaying and delaying chat control as much as possible, to make the free software, federated systems better and appealing to regular people. And then we can use that technology to buy time to push for political changes. I feel the only long-term solution here will be a political, rather than technical one.

It all feels like an impossible task, but I feel all we can do is try as hard as we can to make the world more like the one we want.

I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.

Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.

Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!

• Android: Conversations
• iOS: Siskin
• Windows & Linux: Dino
• Mac OS: Beagle IM
• Web: Converse JS

As a note of caution, I used Oracle’s free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven’t had any issues for 2+ years now.

Along similar lines, I’d say Snikket. I feel XMPP often has quite a bad reputation based on the user experience from 10 years ago, but it’s come such a long way and projects like Snikket make it very easy to get started.

I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.