Gajim

With data breaches and increasingly more data-hungry advertising agencies, many users try their best to keep their private conversations away from the prying eyes of hackers and other malignant actors. One way of doing so is by resorting to open alternatives that do not belong to particular companies and are free from being influenced by certain agendas, such as the XMPP standard.

While a wide variety of clients is available for those eager to free themselves from the shackles of proprietary software, users looking for a balanced mixture of both form and function can try out Gajim.

Once installed, the app prompts you to either log in or create an account on the server of your choice, without tying any personally identifiable information to your credentials, such as an email address or phone number. When connected, the program greets users to a minimalist interface that should feel familiar to those fleeing the Discord platform, thanks to its ability to categorize conversations and group chats in larger communities, known as “Workspaces”, which helps you create threads dedicated to particular stages of a work project, for instance.

Apart from bundling support for multiple accounts for those separating their personal and work chats, the app also lets you select the granularity of the details it can report on your peers, such as their status changes or read receipts for solving urgent matters. On top of an elegant dark mode option for late night chatting, Gajim provides the option to install community-powered plugins for extending its functionality, ranging from menus with customizable quick replies to message filtering tools.

While its feature set is solid for a program in this category, it is important to note that voice and video chatting are not supported at the time of writing, which may put many users reliant on online lectures, conferences and video meeting at a disadvantage.

Whether you want to move away from non-secure proprietary messaging platforms, or you are looking for a highly customizable dedicated client for the XMPP standard, Gajim’s power-user-oriented features let you safeguard your privacy without sacrificing pivotal functions that more mainstream online messengers offer by default.