Recently, the Prav app was released in F-droid. In this application, registration is by phone number.
What do you think about this?
Anything that wants my personal phone number can fuck right off
It would put me off using it.
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.
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- People behind Prav have experience of running public XMPP services for a decade (at poddery.com), and some more people joined later. I have written a blog post on how the project came to be https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/backstory-behind-prav-app-project/ . You can also see people behind the team https://prav.app/about and credits section https://prav.app/credits .
@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.
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
@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
@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
@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.
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?
- We already include some patches from cheogram to support message moderation and we are waiting for conversations v3 redesign (we hope to include that too). We are planning some more changes like allowing custom username instead of phone number.
- @aryak says that will be soon changed to tethered to a single service warning.
- Currently we are using twilio, which is not based in India and we are considering options based in India (which is cheaper).
To all the prav folks responding here, sorry if my message came up rubbing the wrong way, I didn’t mean to be diminutive or dismissive in any way. I am glad to see my questions answered, and I guess prav makes sense in the specific context that was mentioned. I only wish it was a little bit more explicit about what it is, what it is not, and whom it targets. I wish you good luck with your project :)
@u_tamtam the challenge is about setting the limits - how deep should be go when we explain? Do we assume people already know #XMPP and focus on what is different? Or do we assume people have only seen WhatsApp (may be Telegram and Signal too?). I think our focus being on people who have never heard of XMPP, I think the current choices makes sense. But still we can consider giving clues or tips for people who already know XMPP to find the differences.
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I am one of the people behind prav app. I would like to clarify some points:
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Prav is just another XMPP client and service so people uncomfortable with sharing phone number can choose any other XMPP app and service
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We are in the process of registering a cooperative in India and funding will be through transparent user subscriptions. We are currently in beta.
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No thanks, I’d rather set up my own XMPP or Matrix server.
I personally don’t agree with it. I already use Signal and I don’t like that it requires a phone number.
I read the news where they wrote about the leak of numbers and verification codes in Signal. I don’t understand why this messenger doesn’t provide an alternative registration option.
Most users care more about contact discovery than privacy so it makes sense for them to implement it and unlike Signal, it uses #xmpp so everyone has the freedom to use any other app that doesn’t require a phone number and you are still able communicate with everyone on Prav.
I think that Prav can be recommended to friends who are used to registering for different services using a number. Such people are not accustomed to unnecessary steps during registration.
Not gonna happen. I have a “burner” number too, but I still won’t give that to anyone if I can avoid it.
@[email protected] I think it works well for people who don’t know how to use email.
@Slow i feel bad about it. I dont want to share my phone number 🤷♂️
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