The other day I switched Linux distros, wiped disk, and somehow realised that OMEMO is a weird freaky thing and now I cannot see any message from my computer, even though I have everything visible on my Conversations Android app.
I don’t want to get angry again, but… yeah, this is terrible, terrible UX. Seems like OMEMO somehow encrypts for each device differently, and now all messages are “locked”. Which is weird, because messages are still there, just “locked”.
Can I somehow import a backup from my Android app? Is there anything that can be done? My guess is that, probably not, otherwise I would have gotten a popup or something in the login process, “would you like to sync your messages?”, but nothing happened.
XMPP supremacists, please! Give me a solution! I was organizing important projects with multiple people. Getting locked out of all that information is terrible.
Otherwise, then I really feel I can see XMPP disappearing now… and for a very good reason.
@unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de in this case, it was designed explicitly as a security feature. It’s not uncommon for end-to-end encrypted services to have this limitation. Signal has it, for example. Only way you can keep your message history with Signal is to migrate it directly from installation to installation, and it doesn’t sync old messages when setting up the desktop client.
Signal has recently added the message sync option when linking a new desktop client.
@noodlejetski@lemm.ee Did not know that. Must be very recent.
Aside from that, it makes sense that it took Signal a while to get the sync feature because Signal ONLY stores messages locally. XMPP stores them on the server. I would expect to be able to access that information from anywhere. What’s the point of doing so anyway? Let me at least import the keys so I can unlock those messages. But it seems like you can’t.
Pretty sure that has been a feature for at least 2 years. It seems like a reasonable compromise.
they’ve added it earlier this year.