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Good question! Your perspective on that might differ a lot depending on how long you've been on the internet.
In recent years, every major messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, ...) has been doing it this way, linking your phone number to your identity, so your contacts are automatically discovered from your address book (and reciprocally, people who have your phone number already will find you easily and as soon as they install the app you recommended to them). If that's all you've ever known, not only is that not a bug (or rather, a major privacy and identity linkage breach), that's a convenient feature, and you kind of expect things to work that way. I personally don't like that (and I'm aware of being a dying species).
Now, regarding Prav, please don't use it (for the time being, at least). As far as I can tell, this is a fork of the Conversations/quicksy.im XMPP clients (Conversations being the original work, and Quicksy being a derivative by the same author using the phone number discovery / easy onboarding approach discussed here). Unlike the original which is very safe and reputable, whose author is known and very active within the XMPP/security communities, and whose hosted service has years and years of excellent service and uptime under its belt, this one comes out of nowhere, from an unknown contributor (afaict), has no funding model to suggest it being sustainable, and worse, no rationale as to why it exists in the first place (why would it be chosen over the original). So, my recommendation is to stick to those.
Back to the original question, thanks to Quicksy.im having been around for several long years already, the debate of having phone numbers being used for identification on XMPP is not really something new. Having been there for a very long time and seen the before/after, indeed this has enabled some of my current contacts (who were already users of other services like WhatsApp and certainly didn't mind) to get on board a bit more easily. They are not the majority, so, and in all, I'm glad that the option exists, it's not as big a deal as it might seem for XMPP in general.
@u_tamtam @Slow I'm part of Prav team and I have been promoting XMPP and #FreeSoftware for many years. I'm a long time Debian Developer and maintains gitlab in Debian. I'm part of the community maintaining many services to public including XMPP services at diasp.in and poddery.com Prav is just trying a different approach to running an XMPP service. Both poddery.com and diasp.in is fully volunteer driven and we are finding it difficult to get new volunteers.
@u_tamtam @Slow Also we have been working on Prav for over 2 years already gathering members required to register a coop in India. We need 50 members from two states to register a multi state cooperative and we are very close to that number. We are in process of finalizing bye-laws and will be registering soon. At Prav, we are happy if new people learn about Quicksy and XMPP through us even if they don't join Prav.
Let ask few questions:
Will the app UI change?
Is there anything you can do to prevent the "This app tracks and reports your activity" warning in F-droid?
And the question related to the SMS processing center. Is the service located in India?
@Slow
Praveen - u_tamtam mentioned what I have been thinking about Prav - what's the rationale for it to exist and why should I choose it over the original?
/Of course, I appreciate the work you and the other volunteers are doing to spread the awareness of XMPP, Privacy, and Security (in India).
@Deus another Prav volunteer here. If you need to ask about choosing it over the original, you're probably better off with the original 😅
The personal motivation behind Prav was similar to Quicksy: to get friends onto XMPP when they're too impatient to learn how it all works :xmpp:
We realised it helps to be running the service ourselves, and to be able to modify the app as our users request (which can of course be propagated upstream if there is interest) 🛠️
🧵 1/3
@Slow @u_tamtam @praveen
@Deus I guess you'd use Prav if:
🇮🇳 you are based in India
🗳️ you want to be part of our cooperative society and make decisions on what happens next (even if you're not a developer)
💰 you want to support the development and running costs, but, more importantly, the publicity we're doing in India (if we have leftovers, we plan to donate them upstream)
:xmpp: and/or, you just want to talk to your friend with this new "XMPP" thing they're going on about
🧵 2/3
@Slow @u_tamtam @praveen
@Deus but when people are more deeply interested, or if they aren't based in India, we do direct them to other projects like Cheogram, Snikket, and of course Quicksy and Conversations itself! ↗️
🧵 3/3
@Slow @u_tamtam @praveen
@Deus @Slow @u_tamtam If you already know/use/happy with original, please continue using the same. Even if you are laerning about it and still find it better than Prav, please use them too. We are just offering one more #XMPP service with some differences which some users might find better. The service run as a cooperative might be attractive to some users because the priorities are set by a group of people in a democratic way giving people an option to participate.
@Deus @Slow @u_tamtam Another thing going for us is, anyone who personally knows any of the Prav members, there is a direct personal trust. We can also more confidently pitch Prav to our family and friends since we have a direct involvement in how Prav is operated and how privacy policy is made in Prav. This could potentially motivate more people to try Prav, instead of suggesting them to install some random app.
@Deus @Slow @u_tamtam I think one crucial thing missing in these comments is, "Not everyone wants to or have to make the same choices about an app or service to be talk to each other." A federated system allows everyone to make different choices without losing the ability to talk to each other. So the real answer is, if you are not convinced by Prav, you don't have to use it and you are not forced to use Prav just because all your friends are already using Prav. #XMPP #Federation #Choice