But you do realize that DeltaChat also received a quite significant amount of money from the US Open Technology Fund over its course of development and to this day it is somewhat unclear how they fund what seems to be several full time developers?

This is all part of the secret plot of a sentient AI that has taken over the US and wants to leave the planet asap /s

The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.

For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.

For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.

P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.

Apparently a rebranded LiveKit, which is developed by an US American company…

Even if they sell like hot cakes relative to their intended audience of Steam users, it will not make much of a difference in overall market share. Steam might be relatively big with PC gamers, but overall they are rather tiny.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/nsa_wands_aws/

You can observe that your Signal client connects to IPs that belong to AWS, which is the same thing.

I don’t need evidence for water being wet 🤷

Look, if you run the server you have access to metadata of clients connecting to it. That is networking 101. And that Signal shares phone numbers and connection timestamps is well established by court documents.

The security audits are of the code and encryption algorithm, not the infrastructure.

They have live access to all of the metadata and can easily correlate that with phone numbers that Signal stores and shares on request of governments. Just because Signal claims they don’t store anything doesn’t mean that the ones that 100% run all the servers Signal uses don’t access and store anything. You are being extremely naive if you believe Signals BS marketing.

The infrastructure is under control of an antagonistic government, yes. Hetzner is also technically a private company, but they obviously willingly complied with requests from the German government.

Their server infrastructure is (run by Pentagon and NSA best buddies AWS).

I am talking about xmpp servers 🤷

A lot, but please educate yourself, this topic has been extensively discussed here and in other places.

You are very naive if you think that is all the US government can do in regards to Signal, but suit yourself 🤷

The IRC (Biboumi) and Discord bridges (slidge.im) for XMPP work still fine and running your own server is super lightweight.

Significant improvements to certificate pinning and validation have been added to all major XMPP clients as a result of this incident, but it should also be clear that hosting a server on infrastructure under control by an antagonist government (see also Signal) is a very bad idea and hard to mitigate against.

It’s not any worse than the differen’t feature support levels of different Matrix clients. But especially on Android, XMPP has nice modern clients with all the features you would expect, including a/v calls and reactions/stickers.

The main issue right now are up to date Windows desktop clients, but on Linux desktop there are some good options.

There is: XMPP 🤷

There is not much they can do about it short of shutting down the entire server. Due to how matrix functions internally any sufficiently large federated homeserver replicates most of the entire network.