Messaging with the L5

Hardware Librem 5
48

Personally, I find the discussed messengers too heavyweight. I like the following two which have been around in F-Droid for quite a while already:

  • silence.im (practically-serverless, uses regular SMS/text messages and encrypts them the signal way)
  • delta.chat (practically-serverless, uses the existing e-mail infrastructure)

Both have their pros and cons, but I think integrating the silence functionality into the default messenger app on the L5 would not hurt. Of course it does not provide a solution for group chats and sending media, but would be way better than unencrypted text messages.

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49

I have a lot pushed in Silence direction for SMS (here, there, and in this forum too), but I feel they don’t have resource to integrate Silence Protocol into the SMS app, which is too bad.

About messaging app, I have discovered Jami on F-Droid : this is really promising ! I don’t know why it is not known so much, I have tested and it works pretty well so far. It’s a messaging app like Signal, but without server (so same method as Silence) and you can send messages, call, but also video call. Everything is store in local (because serverless), and is peer-to-peer encrypted.

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50

The main drawback of Jami is offline messages don’t work. Both users need to be online to receive them.

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51

I didn’t know that, I thought I could send messages offline. I hope to test this situation to confirm, maybe Jami has improved this aspect since.

52

@rinokeros : so after testing :

  1. message sent offline to offline recipient : no message received by the recipient
  2. message sent online to offline recipient : message received by the recipient after enabling data

So for me, Jami is pretty convenient for what it does. The only issue is the battery drain, still not optimized yet.

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53

Over here in the Netherlands everyone uses Whatsapp. That includes family, colleagues, teachers, class mates, team mates, you name 'm. And nobody is going to switch to anything else very soon.

SMS is all but forgotten, MMS no longer works.

So, for the L5 to be workable chat device over here in Western Europe it definitely needs to speak fluent Whatsapp. (And It would be lovely if it manages to does this without selling its (and our) soul to the marketing devil,)

54

Has the infrastructure of your country lost the technical ability ? or is this just about habits of the people ?
I suggest you to look at ‘anbox’ to be able to “speak” this shit

55
56

T-mobile has switched it off. Because of a “lack in demand”…

57

Oops. I responded before I saw Kieran quoted my message from the other thread. Well, you probably have to read it twice to believe it anyway.

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58

Will running Whatsapp in Anbox sort of ‘isolate’ it from the rest of the phone? I mean, Whatsapp doesn’t really “fall in line with our philosophy”.

59

Well, that’s going to be difficult. All data is going through their servers (meta data) and if one of your contacts makes backups to the cloud your conversations will be stored unencrypted.

Anyway, you could use a matrix bridge as there should be matrix clients (fractal, dino etc.): https://matrix.org/bridges/#whatsapp

1 Like
60

That sounds promising! Same situation over here (also western europe): I’m seemingly the last one to use SMS. Everybody else is on WA. Not using WA means missing out on lots of things. People discussing where and when to meet to spend a weekend out in the forests camping. Not having WA can mean not being part of the planning. Not being part of it slowly means being pressed to the outer rim of the plate before eventually falling over.

So being able to use an alternative software to connect to WA would mean a big plus. Thanks for mentioning it (i didn’t look for it since quite a while).

61

I believe what happens in Anbox stays in Anbox, but that might have to be double-checked. I’m 99% sure though.

62

I will surely give it a try, because it seems like the best solution - not just for WA, but for chatting allround.

But so far, I was under the impression bridge building is not as user friendly as one would wish. But I would like it to work, so I will do my best.
:+1:

1 Like
63

Where is the help file? :pleading_face:

64

I’ll check the wiki…

From the wiki: “A WhatsApp client running on a phone or in an emulated Android VM” needed at runtime.

People migrating from a Windows Phone can’t run a client. So we would need to install a WA client in Antbox on the L5 before we can use WA without a client.
(I managed to install Signal on my Surface tablet by using faking it from the command line on a linux machine (using a cli, I think). Would this also work for WA, maybe?)

The wiki is not very helpful. Is there something like a real manual aswell?

65

What is the conclusion here for 2025 users? I tried to register signal without Android and it does not just seem possible. I don’t have Android and I don’t like emulators, so I gave up on signal. Is there an app on Librem 5 that actually message?

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66

You can find clients for XMPP and Matrix. Matrix is also included in chatty (but only some basic functionalities).

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67

Are there any daemon pollers for matrix that can push to dbus? Keeping matrix running 24x7 is power consuming. I could not find any and now thinking about writing one myself

2 Likes