Jami
Private Conversations
The messenger app Jami offers clients for all popular operating systems and promises maximum anonymity for chats, as well as voice and video calls, by dispensing with central servers.
AOL, ICQ, MSN – the list of these once extremely popular messengers could be extended considerably. Today they are consigned to internet history, although some online providers still try to sell especially short or easy to remember ICQ numbers for thousands of US dollars.
But the world today uses WhatsApp. Over 1.5 billion users use this messenger, which Facebook acquired in 2014 for $19 billion [1]. Away from the mainstream, smaller messengers such as Wire, Signal, and Telegram have carved out a niche for themselves. At the top of the list of reasons why users choose one of these alternatives is the desire for more privacy.
Most messengers require central servers in the background, and this, in turn, means registering with your email address or phone number. This is not true for the open source Jami. In a similar approach to BitTorrent, the Jami messenger uses a distributed hash table to set up its own network and can therefore do without central registration [2]. You only need to register with the service if you want to have a unique username that can be found using the messenger's search function – but this does not mean supplying any personal data. Jami is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, as well as for smartphones with Android [3] and iOS [4], and TV sets with Android TV.
[...]
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