You can just download the client for your platform (assuming one is available), or use the web one (otherwise), or just build one from the sources I linked (which is what I do), and login with your usual XMPP account. Would you need an account and have to decide which provider to register with, this would come handy: https://providers.xmpp.net/
In this set-up, prose.org isn't hosting your account and will of course let you interact with thousands of users or more, like any other XMPP client.
Those silicon valley tech billionaires are businessmen who, by the looks of it, have completely fallen for their own marketing, and secluded themselves in a weird echo chamber packed with sycophants and profiteers. They are not superior beings. They have no credential nor academic status enabling them to speak as authorities worth being listened to. Anyone with a critical mind and access to scientific literature understands better than them the actual challenges behind "uploading one's brain to the cloud" and can debunk that science fictionesque bullshit.
All there is to this is a bunch of aging megalomaniacs with too much power, except over death, and that scares the crap out of them and makes them say some stupid shit. And I hate that we sanewash this just because they are rich and influential. As a society we should kick them back to where they belong, which is a court of law, for their continued effort in dismantling our society.
Just below you'll find a section about "self hosting (soon)", though you can already use it with your own XMPP account as a standalone client (no questions asked), like I do, or, optionally, with the server-side components (opensource prosody module).
See my other comment: if you already have an XMPP account, prose is just another client that you can use however you like, for free (and at that point, everyone should be having an XMPP account, if you ask me). If you don't have an account, they can act as service provider (but this being a decentralized network, the don't want to encourage hosting everyone on the same server).
It is not spam, and you miss-read it. Prose is an open-source XMPP client. They can set you up (host on your behalf) for free, up to a certain point. You can pay for it (there is a commercial offering), or you can use it unlimited and with no extra costs than your own server's if you self-host. It's all being developed there in the open in case you don't want to take my word for it: https://github.com/prose-im
In terms of tech and implementation details, it's been years since everyone has been converging towards the same WebRTC architecture (with everyone bundling/linking the same set of basic components and libs as found in chrome, android, ...). As such, a call between two participants (or as a group with less than a dozen participants) should be as good on XMPP as anywhere else (including the commercial options like Google Meet, Zoom, Matrix, ...).
Where things start getting spicier is in large group calls (dozens of participants or more) requiring the stream to be brokered by a central server (SFU), with stream re-compression and optimisation. Standard-XMPP isn't great for that yet (non-standard XMPP, like Jitsi, on which it is based, is pretty damn good, but unavailable from your regular XMPP setup). Work is going on to improve that (on two fronts, with some XMPP servers turning into SFUs, and with a protocol being designed for offloading AV streams to any willing existing SFU).
No idea what prose is.
Prose is an open-source XMPP client with a focus on large rooms/banquet-style conversations (like IRC, slack, …). It is still in its early stages but already quite usable and possibly a good fit for a subset of Skype refugees.
None of those (except Jitsi to a small extent) qualify as replacements if we ever want to evolve out of the silos we let megalomaniac CEOs build to better control us. So I'll add to the list: prose.org , movim.eu (or anything based on XMPP) and matrix.org (though this one is rapidly falling into obsolescence). The keyword here is federation.
It has already started. Microsoft and Google hiking prices with AI bundled in is both a way to inflate the "demand" artificially, keeping the show going (covering up the fact that nobody really wants that, and even less so wants to pay a premium for it: there just is no miracle AI product/application to sell), and to mitigate some of the absurd imminent losses.
You wouldn't see that in an "optimistic" and sound market.
Count me as a fervent critic of Hollywood, but the world isn't binary and (unfortunately) Hollywood hating it doesn't automatically make it a good thing for the rest of us. Essentially OpenAI, Google and the rest of the pack of thieves are lobbying to establish themselves as the rulers of a lawless world, and everything you already hate about Hollywood (its inordinate amount of power, the bullying of the weaker that ensue, the corruption and politics around it, ...) is meant to get back to us, in worse, with new names at the top.
Indeed that would be the end of the copyright law, but only for the oligarchs.
That is exactly the point, and I wouldn't be surprised if soon there is more money to be made "certifying works made without AI" than there is selling API tokens for LLMs, i.e. the OpenAI business model (although I have no idea of what the technical implementation would look like, perhaps a mix of secure enclave computing offering only a predefined set of capabilities barred from AI, combined with a blockchain to persist and distribute the reference and hash of the works done? More to the tally of GenAI being a net loss for humanity).
That's why it should be made compulsory to indicate when something was produced, even partially, by an AI. This time of your life you spent reading some low-effort no-value bullshit you will never get back, and neither will the hundreds/thousands others who read it. This is a net loss for humanity.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel, open standards with similar or better capabilities already exist. Don't create another silo, contribute to making e.g. XMPP clients better.
but it taught us that you always want more than one method of contact, as a a rugpull can happen at any time off any whim.
Being on the internet long enough taught me instead (by having seen countless providers rise and fall since the early 00's) to self-host my comms and prefer open federated protocols. I switched to XMPP, I have no regret, everyone that matters made the move painlessly a decade ago or so.
As someone who's been using ttrss for decades but would be open to trying something new, what would you say is FreshRSS' killer feature (and missing killer feature) compared to ttrss?
(Not trying to start a flame war, ttrss feels like a finished project, which is not a bad thing, but I think it's healthy to wish for more innovation in this space)
XMPP had a kind of renaissance in the recent years (while Matrix only stagnated, and recently turned open-core, but that's besides the point), maybe time to give it a new look? :-)
And thanks to you as well for the cordial discussion! I'm hopeful that bystanders got an interesting read out of it :-)
As of me, the "worst" I would wish upon you is to adventure into XMPP, via an easy-entry app like quicksy.im (android) or monal-im.org (iOS) and see for yourself that you can get something as secure and featured as Signal, without the captivity and monopolistic abuses.
I would go into the specific points, but really none of this invalidates my main point that Signal is a marked step forward
We are going circles but I will repeat it: Signal isn't immutably better than WhatsApp, it only happens to be more politically-aligned with your beliefs (which we share in large parts, to be fair!) at this very instant (and we saw that this can change without notice).
My threshold for justifying a mass-exodus out of a popular messaging system is that 1- it offers non-revocable privacy and security guarantees and 2-, that it doesn't lock its users in a single vendor/single service provider. Those two things combined are important, because they would finally give the chance of breaking away from the never-ending cycle of "enshittification → exodus → unsatisfactory explorations → painful rebuild(s) → monopoly consolidation → user captivity → enshittification". Anything else is a slight variation around the current disappointing status-quo. I don't think it's too far-fetched, and we really deserve this "luxury" for something as fundamental as instant messaging. I can only hope that you understand why I'm not willing to compromise on that.
I'm also willing to bet that, with the rumbling going on in the USA at the moment, Signal might sooner or later become a target of/re-align itself with the new "administration". Maybe then you will sense more of that captivity I keep rambling about?
My point was that you’ll be communicating with people each of whom chose their own service poviders, and thus you’re also trusting those.
The worst thing the other server can do is drop your messages silently, which you will absolutely come to know. Think of XMPP with end-to-end encryption as essentially encrypted email. "What if I can't trust the other server at @bizarre_email_domain.org? Whatever."
u_tamtam @ u_tamtam @programming.dev Posts 6Comments 454Joined 2 yr. ago 
It appears as a tooltip
Anyhow, where I intended to draw your intention was on https://prose.org/downloads
You can just download the client for your platform (assuming one is available), or use the web one (otherwise), or just build one from the sources I linked (which is what I do), and login with your usual XMPP account. Would you need an account and have to decide which provider to register with, this would come handy: https://providers.xmpp.net/
In this set-up, prose.org isn't hosting your account and will of course let you interact with thousands of users or more, like any other XMPP client.