I’ve had very consistant issues with messages not decrypting on Matrix with Megolm, and it’s known for leaking a lot of metadata. I’m also not a fan of the Matrix foundation heavily courting law enforcement and getting funded by Israel. I know it’s open-source, but combined with the problems I’ve faced using, the fact that the self-hosting side mostly targets enterprise use, and the heavy resource usage of Matrix when self-hosting, I personally think XMPP is the better option currently.

OMEMO is structured similarly to Signal’s encryption. It probably doesn’t scale up super well to like, 10,000+ users, but OMEMO can be turned off for super large channels where encryption might not be needed, and turned on for smaller groups where privacy is desired or between friends.

I agree, but sometimes certain VPN’s can be blocked if they are often used by bots, such as free VPN’s. Just thought I’d ask to see if I could narrow down what could be happening (since it works fine on my end, even with a VPN).

Try creating an account here, then use that login to log into the Movim (you can use any XMPP/Jabber account created anywhere to log into any open Movim instance, similar to how any Lemmy user can use their account to login to the Photon front-end).

It’s a PWA, so you should be able to open your browser menu and click ‘add to homescreen’ to make it feel more like a dedicated app.

There are also dedicated XMPP apps for Android and iOS that aren’t yet as full-featured as Movim, but are still compatible with the parts that are implemented (usually all the texting and calling parts, but maybe not video or screensharing).

Alternative link for the guide, since slrpnk is currently down for a bit.