I recently added a second mobile line to my account. I setup both phones to use Librem chat with two separate accounts. I don’t see anyway to direct chat. I have to setup a room for every contact. I was wanting to use only one chat application vs two separate ones. Most people I know won’t use Librem chat even if I setup encryption on both our ends if they can’t use Librem chat for all chats. People are simple and want things easy and fast. If we have to setup a room for every contact vs direct response to phone number for chat, I don’t understand how to avoid using a second application for chat or how I will get anyone to use Librem Chat outside our community. Am I missing something?
*I tried signal chat. It’s encrypted and open source and it let’s me send messages to mobile numbers and works fine. This is the element Librem chat doesn’t have and the only part I really want.
Librem Chat is a fork of Riot, both of which are chat clients for the Matrix protocol.
Every chat in Riot right now is room based. But more immutable direct messages are in the roadmap for Riot.
This will mean that for each contact there is one ‘canonical’ DM. You can of course create multiple group rooms that only have two people in them if you need more than one 1:1 room.
I don’t think the Riot developers are going to integrate SMS/MMS into Riot.
I don’t know about Purism and their Librem Chat product.
Well, I uninstalled Librem chat. I don’t know anyone outside this community that will meet up and use the secure chat and even if I do it for them with both devices, they will stop using it and go back to mobile chat since they won’t keep a separate application just to text me, that isn’t practical. I do forums and text messages only. I’m not a social media type either. I assume they have something planned for texting with mobile phone numbers.
On the librem one site, there is a comparison table about which librem app coppesponds to which other product such as Skype (Switch away from these privacy-invading services). I suppose that future customers will be somewhat disappointed not to find an easy to use one-to-one chat even the more as the marketing leads to this idea. Hopefully this functionality will be added soon or another solution will be found. Certain users might accept these “ramp up topics”. But how about those who accepted ( maybe for the first time in their life ) to leave “skype-and-fiends” in favor of purism (and to pay $70)?
Let’s hope that growing numbers of paying members will lead to better services…