How do you feel about registering in XMPP by phone number?

Slow@lemmy.today to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 17 points –

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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@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?

@Slow

  1. 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.
  2. @aryak says that will be soon changed to tethered to a single service warning.
  3. 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) 🛠️

🧵 1/3

@Slow @u_tamtam @praveen

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 :)