Me and some other people from Free Software Community are planning to release a privacy-respecting free software chatting app, named Prav (means pigeon in Malayalam language) for Indian users, which would be interoperable with XMPP.
We want more people to get involved because we want to have democratic decision making process.
Please visit the website https://prav.app. Also, please share with your contacts.
@ravi why phone number required? Why not completely anonymous! Tying everything to mobile number makes it difficult to change a mobile number. There are already so many services tied up to mobile in India, it’s a nightmare to change once your number is leaked and abused by telemarketers. Just another food for thought.
@garow Because people find plain xmpp inconvenient.Obviously XMPP is federated, so people can register on an anonymous service to talk to users on our service. This is unlike WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, where every participant needs to give phone number. There are plenty of XMPP services which will register you anonymously. We want to give people the same convenience as WA and at the same time they have privacy and freedom.
@ravi @garow yep, I think this is important too. Rather than explaining what XMPP is, I find it easier to just point people to Quicksy, and let them figure it out. If they end up getting interested in privacy and want to switch, *then* they can make the change.