looks good ...
don't know enough about it though...
gotta read up on this new app...


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wir...ion,31389.html

...a flame storm by open-source fanatics starts in 3... 2...

hahahahhahahhaaa
yeah...

Wire is open source, according to the article, but has long as it isn't an open standard and decentralized, it's useless.

Being able to run your own free-software server on the network makes it much, much more robust and resilient against government meddling or commercial fads of the day by the owners.
Note that I said "being able to", as you can still let a trusted third party to do it for you, just like e-mail, jabber.

Moreover, from wire's Terms of Use:

7.2 Accessing the Service. You agree not to access, or attempt to access, the Service by any means other than through the Site or the Apps.

This even precludes the ability to legally use a reverse-engineered client.

Therefore, these seem much more interesting:

https://ring.cx/en
https://tox.chat/

I've tried tox. It sure works, but for me, it has an anti-features which seems to be common amongst many chatsystems: you can't log in from more than one location to the same account, and share a common state and history. Another anti-feature if total decentralized systems like tox seem to be the inability to send offline messages. Understandable, as it would require storing data in the network.

Remarkably, e-mail over IMAP has these features for almost two decades. XMPP now should be able to support these features too, but clients are lacking, at least on Jolla.

How are you equating IMAP and XMPP?

Technically they are of course different, but on concept they are alike: both are decentralized, where server form the network and where the user has an account at such a server. The server (temporarily) stores the messages and metadata. This means the user normally has to trust the server, as it stores the user's data. However, in both cases you can run your own server, and/or use extra end-to-end encryption.

I think e-mail with IMAP IDLE is still ahead over lot of the more ""modern"" messaging systems: both my Jolla and my desktop notify me of a new e-mail as soon as it arrives. Now it doesn't matter on which client I open that e-mail, the other clients immediately know I've opened it and dismiss their notification. They share a common state.

With xmpp, on the other hand, I only get the message at one client, the one with highest priority configured. It sucks when messages arriving on only on my phone, which lays in the next room, even though I'm sitting behind my desktop. There are extensions to remedy this (message carbons, chat log storing and retrieval from the server) but well, as said, clients are still lacking

At least xmpp allows you to login with multiple clients at the same time. Tox doesn't seem to support that.

Tox probably never will get that feature. I was a fan, until I used it. Sure, it's probably a ton more secure than anything else out there, but trying to convince people to use it alongside me using it has proven futile.

Interesting take on IMAP though. Thanks for the new direction of thinking...

@Fuzzillogic, Thanks for the info about tox! (I haven't used any of these myself, so interesting to hear of others' experiences).

Myself, I'm not sure how much the lack of "shared history and state" would bother me -- I like such a feature, but I also like the idea of decentralized; I guess I just have to try it out and see how it works...

Another newish option, which may be exactly what you're looking for and provide the best of both worlds, is http://matrix.org/ -- it is federated rather than distributed (so just like IMAP, it means that clients *do* connect to a server, but are free to choose any server they want (and trust), and all servers can communicate with each other (see https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.h...federated-mean)). So you can get all that shared state and history, but you are still not locked in to any specific vendor, and you can choose a server you trust or host your own.

Alternatively, if you're considering hosting your own server, then perhaps you could instead host your Tox or ring client on a machine that you always have access to, and then route your communications from all end-devices via that (something like quassel for IRC) -- that may give you the shared state and history even though it's all p2p, and still be able to communicate from multiple devices.