↳ In-reply-to » The “Matrix Experiment”, i.e. running a Matrix server for our family, has failed completely and miserably. People don’t accept it. They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!” Yes, you do, I get those messages, I just don’t reply quickly enough because I’m at work or simply doing something else.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t have much family and I talk to them on the phone but I’ve been there on two occasions with friends and Jabber.

They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!”

This scenario has played out the same way for me multiple times. It’s uncanny.

I have some friends on Jabber now but it took time to make that happen. It helps that Conversations on Android is really good. I just hand them $5 cash and have them buy it on the Play Store so I don’t have to answer questions about F-Droid and APK files.

On iOS, I recommend Siskin IM which works most of the time but I need to set it up for them because it doesn’t handle captcha registration very well (fields are shown that shouldn’t be and it’s confusing) and it doesn’t enable OMEMO by default (iirc).

I also used to refer to it as “XMPP”, but I think that made it worse for me. “Jabber” is much less technical-sounding and some people remember hearing others talk about it.