Spectrum 2 VS RetroShare

This is the point where I lose everyone and a big reason for this is that people don't understand how libpurple works with Pidgin, Finch, Adium, bitlbee, spectrum2, telepathy-haze, and maybe others I'm not aware of or forgetting. So that's what we're going to try and tackle today.

> and supports bridging to other types of networks which aren't matrix-based

https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/

Turn any XMPP client into that fancy multiprotocol chat app that every cool kid want.

> Signal, Telegram, Discord, Steam, Mattermost, Facebook, Skype

https://spectrum.im/

Spectrum is an open source instant messaging transport. It allows users to chat together even when they are using different IM networks.

https://github.com/louiz/biboumi

Biboumi is an XMPP gateway that connects to IRC servers and translates between the two protocols. It can be used to access IRC channels using any XMPP client as if these channels were XMPP MUCs.

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I'm using all of those daily to connect to all my other accounts, Slidge is the most modern one and is having lots of features ported to the modern XMPP extensions.

It's actually closer to spectrum2 in how it behaves. I hope slidge will get as rock-solid as biboumi is!

https://spectrum.im/

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal.

Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device.

There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp , https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald , but sadly https://spectrum.im/ is surprisingly finicky to set up.)

There are at least hundreds of implementations of XMPP that are interoperable (at 5-6 actively developed server implementations, many more libraries and many client applications). There are at least hundreds of thousands deployed XMPP services.

In addition XMPP can be linked with other protocols/networks via bridges/gateways. Some examples:

- Spectrum: XMPP gateway project based on libpurple (support for many protocols): https://spectrum.im/

- WhatsApp bridge: https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp

- Telegram bridge: https://github.com/codingteam/emulsion

- Signal bridge: https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/slidge/ (replacement of https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald/ )

Given such a diverse ecosystem of open-source and proprietary implementations, I'd say XMPP is one of the best examples of widespread protocol interoperability that there is.

Nope, the project is almost dead (as most XMPP projects), but there are some recent commits at https://github.com/SpectrumIM/spectrum2

Reminds me of retroshare, which is fully peer to peer and anonymizing. Anyone here try it before? Meant for closed communities and not open/global so a different niche I suppose

https://retroshare.cc/

Retro Share https://retroshare.cc/ free and open source.

Retroshare via Tor/I2P

Retroshare also offers encrypted connections that meeting hosts and participants can create a network of computers on and layer distributed services on top of it, like discussion forums, text-based chat, and email. This P2P platform is free, open-source, and fully decentralized, designed to provide maximum security and anonymity. It's available to Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows users.

I think you can do that with https://retroshare.cc/

Utopia has similarities to RetroShare, but RetroShare has more capability: portable, forums, channels, boards, Tor/I2P.

For messaging, retroshare is really good, it looks like an old forum messenger, but is free to download. its completely ad free.