An ejabberd instance can handle 2 million concurrent users. The free software XMPP server is used by the likes of League of Legends, Fortnite, Zoom. If it’s a good enough for them, it would easily handle your community, big or small.
I mean yes you reduce your privacy by interacting with Microsoft GitHub in general, but posting your Nix config to the public isn’t much of a privacy concern since you shouldn’t have any plaintext secrets anyhow as a best practice since it would be compiled into the Nix store. There are a couple of different ways to encrypt secrets, as well as just not committing private *.nix to a public repository.
This is true, since the base protocol is dead simple without many frills since its goals is real-time communications, not a chat-specific protocol for humans (TLS is good enough for certain applications of the protocol). That said, most modern clients support PGP & OMEMO with many having the encryption on by default and required is usually an option as well. There were some talks about simplifying the OMEMO setup in the future, but it’s good enough for now. See https://omemo.top/ for client suggestions.
If you don’t like having multiple windows open, you can keep them in dedicated container tabs on you main Fx (or favored Fx fork). I have a couple pinned like this in Librewolf now.
Older Sony Xperia phones support LineageOS and have a headphone jack. Normally it isn’t until their 2-warranty is up that a LineageOS build is mainlined (likely because they aren’t high volume & are expensive). I got a III recently to running LineageOS for microG (but the proprietary camera app is missing).
Be aware that the cheaper ASUS Zenfones have a headphone jack, but are nearing a year since their bootloader unlock servers “went down for maintenance”. They’ll likely never come back.
Bidets are the way even when not experiencing diarrhea & it’s weird so many places it’s no the norm. It’s real weird to find a places without the hose sitting right next to the throne when you are finished.
Signal will force you into using an Android or iOS mobile device—no alternatives—and you couldn’t have 2 Android devices (like a tablet, e-reader). You are forced to have a SIM card which gives away part of your identity. Servers are centralized & closed-source (closed for 2 years, rewritten history)—so did the NSA force in a backdoor? …We may never know. On Android, by default notifications are sent thru Google Service’s Firebase (fork Molly supports UnifiedPush now tho). The ToS is questionable with “don’t break the law” language.
Your ideal chat would be free software, P2P or federated+self-hostable servers, E2EE, & the only required personal info you share is your account ID (no phone or email).
You’d think Matrix fits the bill, but its high system requirements (especially storage) & majority Matrix.org mean defacto centralization around an org that controls the spec, the largest server, reference server, & most popular client.
What you are looking for is good ol’ XMPP with OMEMO or PGP set to required in all clients. Its server options run on a toaster, has years of smart engineering & open governance guiding the project, & being extensible by nature, means it’s not purely limited to chat/conferencing. XMPP appears to be the common chat option on the dark web for a reason. You can use gateways to puppet accounts on these untrustworthy networks too (such as messlidger to puppet Facebook Messenger is needed, but also Signal, Telegram, etc.).
Alternatively, Briar & its ilk are gotos, but P2P has some downsides (brains your battery hard on Android).
You’re likely thinking KaiOS. They are still contributing what is required under MPL-2.0 but the rest is proprietary. KaiOS 3.x finally got off of a browser from 2016 as the base, but very few have upgraded their apps to be compatible (the tweaks were minor) & others have used it as a reminder that they were still ‘supporting’ a platform like whoever is maintaining or using that WhatsApp thing for chat.
There’s also Capyloon built from B2G, but it’s still early on & is targeting touch phones, instead of feature phones.
It would be nice to see it around IMO since it’d just be another enhancement to progressive web applications & JavaScript is a better target than Java or Swift.