A personal reason that I wrote this article is because I know a lot of people who want me to use a more mainstream messaging application. Be it Discord, Telegram, Facebook or whatever, and I just don't trust those!
Some of them have encryption, but want my phone number, some are just unencrypted, which means the government can easily read whatever I write, and some are closed source, meaning I can't verify personally if the encryption algorithms are safe.
Except for Pidgin, OTR and XMPP.
Pidgin is GPL, OTR is GPL and XMPP is an open standard, and my personal server uses Prosody, also GPL. Used together, I feel like I'm actually communicating privately, without much fear that I'm being spied on effectively.
That means I can read the code of all the software I'm using to communicate with people, and personally verify that it's safe, and that there's no deliberate backdoor or other security flaw.
We've been using XMPP for our internal company communications for over a decade, quite handy.
You say you've been using XMPP. I assume you don't use it anymore. What are you up to now?
No, I think he meant he's still using it.
XMPP is pretty decent. It's old, but it works. The ability to run your own server is the charm of it.
Well those apps are all good. But there is still the issue with metadata. That is even a thing for Tor messenger. I use Ricochet. As far as i know the most anonymous and secure messenger. When i am a place where i am not allowed to use Tor i go for cryptocat.