[dasyatidprime]

E2E hasn't come gracefully to me yet, because my Pidgin still only has OTR support, and so does the one one of my primary Jabber contacts uses, except Conversations has now dropped it in favor of going all-OMEMO. My current answer is to ignore the mobile case like I did most of the time before, but that's not a good answer.

I guess maybe I need to switch to Gajim, but this sure isn't frictionless, mostly due to the lag-induced fragmentation.

[ge0rg]

Pidgin essentially stopped supporting new XMPP features a decade ago. This includes multi-device support and many new convenience features (delivery receipts, file uploads). There are some plugins that might be able to compensate, but at significant effort.

OTR wasn't made for the multi device use case at all (and even OTRv4 is explicitly single-device). If you happen to log in with multiple clients, it will most probably confuse the other side's OTR plugin

[elagost]

Pidgin has OMEMO support.

https://github.com/gkdr/lurch

This works fairly well for me.

[dasyatidprime]

I know you mean well, and I'm glad this exists and that you reminded me of it (I now remember having seen it before), but this isn't enough to invalidate my point. The installation instructions are… barely okay. AUR… okay, I guess. What would people on Debian-based platforms, like the very popular Ubuntu, do? Compile from source?

Let's see what the README says: “I know this is a bit clunky, but using the command interface for interactions makes the plugin usable in clients that do not have a GUI.”

So now I get to explain this to the other people I was using Pidgin+OTR with too, right? (Also I get to have to remember what the commands are, because I won't be using them frequently.)

I mean, this can also be phrased as one of the disadvantages of being part of the earlier installed base, but on a wider scale, buildup of legacy resistance is one of the things that you wind up having to overcome if you want to introduce new features that aren't strictly optional—which is kind of why we still don't really have secure email that doesn't take massive cognitive overhead in “remembering which things people are using” and massive social overhead in negotiating about it and being prepared for all sorts of responses.

(Added:) And to make sure I'm not accidentally taking this into the weeds, the incompatibility was introduced AFAIK when Conversations dropped OTR. That means any Pidgin clusters suddenly take on a big UI and polish downgrade for their E2E if they want to stay interoperable. I'm not meaning to criticize this specific plugin so much as to point out that there wasn't enough overall coordination between seemingly-major clients to stop this from happening.