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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Nristen's (g)log
2021-07-14
I always keep an eye out for new tools/services for communication. Some of my priorities are:
One of my main current goals is to keep my communication out of the hands of poeple that would use it either for their own gain or use it against me. Not that I commit crimes but in the world today, who knows what some people in the future would consider a crime... for example saying something like people should stay away from facebook.
Having your communication encrypted from user to user helps but the servers the communication goes through still knows who is sending information to whom so for this reason, I want to be the one who controls the server I use.
A couple years ago, I discovered the keybase service who stated their goal was to make the use of gpg type encryption easier for the common person to use.
This was a lofty goal that I fully support however looking back over the history of Keybase, I believe that this type of tool can not be entrusted to a single entity. Everyone no matter what have a price that they will sell for. Zoom obviously met the price of the people at Keybase. Since this happened I have been looking for a replacement.
In order to keep meta data out of the hands of 3rd parties, I decided that it had to be something that I hosted myself.
I narrowed it down to Matrix and XMPP. When it comes to computers and IT I prefer a minimalist approach which made me lean in the direction of XMPP since there were several options for a server.
I hoped to use something that I could run on a Raspberry Pi so I decided to try Prosody an XMPP server written in the Lua language. At first I tried installing the version in Rasbian's package repositories however I found that version to pretty old and most of the documentation applied to newer versions.
I uninstalled the repo and downloaded the source code, installed required pages and then compiled Prosody which went very quickly.
I used certbot to get an SSL cert so the clients wouldn't complain. After playing around with the configuration a little I installed an Android XMPP client, Conversations on my android phone and profanity (cli client) on my linux laptop. I installed Conversations on my wife's phone and so far we have been very happy with the quality and ease of making video calls between us.
I was especially happy with how little resources Prosody uses:
Process 'prosody' status Running monitoring status Monitored monitoring mode active uptime 1d 0h 37m threads 1 children 0 cpu 0.0% cpu total 0.0% memory 0.8% [7.5 MB] memory total 0.8% [7.5 MB]
Next challenge: Getting my brother to install a client on his phone (he hates using anything other than sms text messages).
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