projectmoon

leetnewb@beehaw.org said in Is there a way I can make my XMPP (Conversations) messages synced to my desktop?:

Well, the blog post for it is from January 2025. https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devices/

So I guess it has not been around too long! But it’s interesting they’ve added it. Sounds like it works similarly to the existing message transfer, but with the addition of multiple encryption keys (similar to how Matrix does it).

unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de it also seems that Conversations now has the ability to preserve message history when moving devices. Of course this is different than moving between clients, but it’s a step in the right direction.

@noodlejetski@lemm.ee Did not know that. Must be very recent.

@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.

But, you should be fine if you have a backup of Conversations, at least on Conversations itself.

OMEMO by design does not allow old messages to be decrypted by a new device. However, anything going forward should sync between all XMPP clients that implement proper XEPs. The server also has to support the XEPs. But if you’re using OMEMO, then you should also already have the other XEPs required for proper messaging experience. Specifically, the XEP for syncing messages across clients is Message Carbons.

Matrix is able to decrypt past messages on new devices, but that’s because it stores your keys (encrypted) on the server and does a bunch of funky key fetching and passing between sessions to allow message decryption from new verified sessions. OMEMO does not have this function.