This is odd because I know a few mainland Chinese people that use XMPP without problems (and afaik without a VPN).

Sounds like your server got blocked for another reason?

Well, instead of leaking metadata to Signal, AWS, Cloudflare, Google/Apple and your ISP, like Signal does, RCS only leaks it to your ISP /s

You can easily redirect xmpp to port 443 which is not blocked by most fitewalls. If you have problems with firewalls or public wifis your xmpp server is misconfigured.

The actual military grade (xmpp based) messengers implement security lables, meaning messages are tagged with the required security clearance and if you invite random people to a chat they can’t see the messages.

The server can swap to a modified JS that exfiltrates the e2ee key and thus allows the server owner to decrypt the messages, or in more advanced encryption schemes add additional keys without you knowing and achieve the same thing.

Yes you can juryrig something like that with cookies, but it is highly fragile and browser based e2ee is basically a scam anyways as the server serving the website can always swap out the javascript that decrypts the messages.

e2ee is not really compatible with what you want due to necessary key management, and once you drop that there are so many possible options for what you want that I don’t want to list them all here.

Yes, in theory, but in praxis no because self-hosting the sync server alone still depends on the centralized auth server from Mozilla, and self-hosting that as well is possible but complicated. It’s sadly a mess, and you might be better off not using Firefox sync at all.

As for your other question, depends on the specific addon, but usually no.

The cheapest way would be to buy a domain from OVH and use their free offer of a 5gb single email address that is included with each domain.

You still need to log into their servers and thus provide them a lot of meta-data, like IP addresses, when and approximatly where you are using your browser, on how many devices etc.

I could pretty effectively prevent it from being used for mass surveillance.

And a future you might decide differently.

Hmm yeah, I thought this is about organisation internal discussion. Of course if it is just a mailbox for outsiders to use, you could just configure some forwarders so that multiple people get the emails and can respond from their own account if necessary.

Selfhosting email specifically is quite hard. Not so much technically, but because of how a few large providers have cornered the market and drop most self-hosted emails reaching them with the excuse of fighting spam.

Hosting a forum that requires login credentials (incl. 2fa etc.) is quite easy though. But I guess that wouldn’t work as a way for outsiders to contact you.

I am confused why you would use a single email address instead of a mailinglist.

It is also possible to set up a private forum with mailinglist capabilities.

Genetally speaking it is better to find a trust worthy host, or host on your own hardware than trying to repurpose some public service and hope e2ee alone is sufficient.

Your friend at the shore caught some fish?

Igalia is currently working hard on making it easy to use Servo as an embeddable browser engine similar to how Chromium can be used.

The problems of doing that with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox, is main reason why there are so few alternative browsers based on it.

Uh, did your account get hacked?

That’s like literal AfD propaganda you are repeating here.

And while there is some very limited truth to the first (but he has had similar competences on state level for many years), the “opposition newspaper” is like an actual extreme right wing rag and the legal process is still ongoing, the courts just ruled that the minister of interior overstepped her official competence by trying to shut it down in the legal grey area way she tried doing it.

Afaik the “horn” of a narwhal is a tooth though.

The municipality cut back the hortensia flowers, so once they grow back in spring it should look really nice. Loads of those around here.

This is not either or. You can store things only until the recipient comes online and then delete it (but Matrix specifically doesn’t do this and conceptually can’t due to its design).

Some comment by the Element CEO on Hackernews, sorry I don’t have a link right now.

But since it would be optional I am not sure why you worry about that. It wouldn’t change the status quo, which is already bad.