Im very impressed with Slidge whatsapp bridge on my Prosody server. It is far more stable and reliable than I ever expected, and means I do not need any Facebook owned apps on my personal phone, as whatsapp is installed on my work phone only and slidge is linked to that ( my workplace use it, because free and “everyone has it” heh.)
My family have refused to move over to xmpp after the matrix server we used shut down, even after I ran a few different test servers on both prosody and ejabberd and tested reliability of the platforms and mobile notifications. (Both work great, but at the time I decided on Prosody.) My family’s reasoning was that they already use whatsapp and I’m just being weird.
The slow creep of rights and privacy erosion is disturbing to me, and the small amount I can do like running my own fedi instance and chat server at least helps me keep my sense of sanity in this crazier and crazier world of surveillance and data harvesting.
A bridge to the chat platform at least means it isn’t on my phone that is with me everywhere, and doesn’t inconvenience my family from me being the “weird extremist”.
We do what we can.
@nigel good to know! I last experimented with bridges, what...a decade ago? They were pretty unstable at the point (more the fault of the messaging companies changing their APIs every so often than anything else) but it's good to hear things have improved
I'm lucky not to have to use most of those centralised platforms any more, but I should try running #slidge again and see if it helps my friends
They (your family) had bad experience with a service that stopped working and now as you say they refused to use something different. Probably because of the "fear" if start using something new, not to stop again at some point.
For non-techy people is difficult to change software they used frequently.
Good that you have self-hosted xmpp service. Wish you luck to convince your family and happy chatting!