@movq I feel your pain like my own. No matter what I do, I am always outnumbered by the ignoramus in the family. It is like bashing one's head on a brick wall.

@movq 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.

@movq Group chat is still pretty rough around the edges, especially if you want encryption. I don't use it with my friends. If you need group chat, it's probably better to use something else.

@movq TBH I don't like Matrix... It feels a bit messy, my conversations and servers I join tend to get mangled, some stuff tend to have some sub-stuff... etc. I don't hate it though, because I know I may have been using it wrong.

But hey, have you ever tried Databag ? Your family might get a better user experience with this one.

I admit I've always compromised on this way too much myself, always to this day having Facebook Messenger just to communicate in my families group chats. Sure I run it in a Work profile on my GrapheneOS phone that I can switch off at any time, I can completely cut it off from network access any time as well, I can have a lot of rudimentary control over it, I use it as sparingly as possible, but it doesn't change the fact everytime I use it we're funneling private convos through bloody Meta's servers and trackers etc.

I tried Signal, and I didn't like it. I don't like the interface, I don't like one has to rely on a relatively small company infrastructure. It has bugs, and issues: sometimes messages will deliver, sometimes they will not.

Nothing has been more stable for me (as an Apple user, that is) than Messages. It comes with the OS, it is beautiful, and it just works.

Related to this.

"Some users experienced message delivery delays beginning last night that primarily impacted linked devices like Signal Desktop. We just deployed a fix. Affected users might see failed delivery notices while Signal automatically catches up. We apologize for the inconvenience!"

Source: Signal Fediverse account

@movq the algorithms are nuts everywhere. I was cancelled from Instagram and TikTok a while back for the same reason, yet, at the time I got the email telling me about it I hadn't used them both for over a year. 🤷🏻

@movq pleas no.

My wifes mom nearly got her account fully taken over by some hacker. They were able to get control and change password but I was able to get it recovered before they could get the phone number reset. They sent messages to all her contacts to send cash.