this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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I'm curious, I've never had the chance to really use Signal much, and I've never used an XMPP client before. What made you dislike Signal and use XMPP instead? I wish I could convince my iMessage loving mom to jump to anything else.
I prefer it because of resilience. A centralized service can be weakened, geoblocked or shut down by proposals like Chat Control. Decentralized protocols are much safer in such an environment, especially if there is variety in clients and servers.
I had no issue with signal (except phone number verification) but according to my family members signal uses a lot of ram and battery. Non of them have Google play services. XMPP doesn't use that much resources and it's simple, no unnecessary bloat.
Sure all family members dont have play services...
Also bullshit that Signals drains ram or battery, i wouldnt notice and never heard this before.
Maybe Signal drains battery when it can't use Google Play Services for notifications and falls back to keeping a connection alive to Signal servers instead?
I have signal installed direct using obtanium, with the background connector enabled. I've not yet had an issue with it.
Yeah thats the reason.
Im running grapheneos with molly foss (signal fork). I tried both notification deamons, Websocket and Selfhosted UnifiedPush. Both dont drain my battery at all.
Then all messenger services would do that on their phone
Not necessarily. Some of them are able to use UnifiedPush so no need in a background service, and some of them (like Conversations) have background services whose battery use is negligeable.
I heard that before too. On calls, especially video calls
Yeah because video calls just use battery.
Its like saying my car is draining gas when i use it heavily. It just uses more when you use it heavily.
You mean when streaming video bandwidth, bidirectionally across the radio?
And encrypted. Im not surprised just heard it as a complaint