Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

October saw the release of Cheogram Android 2.10.10-3, the largest release in awhile.  The app now stores data de-duplicated, so if you send or receive the same file multiple times only one copy will be stored.  This also lays the groundwork for some new file transfer improvements that will be coming in the future.  The app also now supports displaying rich text messages sent by clients which support that (such as Gajim), including the image protocol needed to display stickers sent by Movim users.  A form of message retraction is also supported, and should work with most Jabber clients out there.  A reminder that message retraction is a social convention and not a security feature – the target still has a full copy of your un-retracted message if they want it.

We know lots of you have big contact lists, across multiple accounts, and that’s why this release introduces the ability to edit tags on your contacts and a tag navigation widget integrated into contact search: to make finding the right conversation just a little bit easier.  We would love to hear feedback about this UI and how well it works for you.

For those of you who start a lot of group texts, there is an easy way to do that built into the app now as well.  When you start a “private group chat” and select only @cheogram.com contacts, you will be prompted to ask if you meant to start a group text instead.  This flow seemed necessary, as many have accidentally created private channels with their SMS contacts instead of the intended group text, so checking at this point was likely to be necessary anyway.

There are also some smaller quality of life improvements in this release, including the ability to copy any link in a message to the clipboard (not just the first one), dumping app logs to a special directory on your device after every call in order to make debugging issues easier, asking if you want to keep app data on uninstall (to make switching back and forth to custom builds possible without always needing export/re-import), a new first-start welcome screen, performance improvements, and more.

As JMP grows so does our support load.  Up until this month we have been managing all our support requests using normal Jabber clients (mostly Gajim and Dino), which worked well enough but less and less well as we grew.  It would be hard to know if someone else was handling a request, who had previously handled a request, or even what the status of some requests were (if they had been resolved elsewhere in the public channel or otherwise).  We’re a small enough team that we can just talk to each other to solve these things, but that does take time, and more time as there are more things to talk out.  So this month we built an XMPP channel integration for Chatwoot and have migrated our main support infrastructure to a Cheogram-hosted instance.  So far we like this a lot, and so much we’ve decided to share.  If you have a project that handles support using Jabber (or SMS with JMP!) you can use it on the Cheogram Chatwoot instance.  Just come by the chatroom and let us know you’re interested.  Only the XMPP channel works on our instance for now, but we’d be happy to enable other channels as well if that would be useful.

And finally, we know many of you are excited about the JMP Data Plan.  Roll out to the waiting list has gone a bit slower than we hoped, but many SIMs did go out in October.  There have been some bumps as you might expect with any test phase, but overall things are looking good and we hope to speed up the roll out and even move on to the next phase soon.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Some apps and services (but not JMP!) require an SMS verification code in order to create a new account.  (Note that this is different from using SMS for authentication; which is a bad idea since SMS can be easily intercepted, are not encrypted in transit, and are vulnerable to simple swap scams, etc.; but has different incentives and issues.)  Why do they do this, and how can it affect you as a user?

Tarpit

In the fight against service abuse and SPAM, there are no sure-fire one-size-fits-all solutions.  Often preventing abusive accounts and spammers entirely is not possible, so targets turn to other strategies, such as tarpits.  This is anything that slows down the abusive activity, thus resulting in less of it.  This is the best way to think about most account-creation verification measures.  Receiving an SMS to a unique phone number is something that is not hard for most customers creating an account.  Even a customer who does not wish to give out their phone number or does not have a phone number can (in many countries, with enough money) get a new cell phone and cell phone number fairly quickly and use that to create the account.

If a customer is expected to be able to pass this check easily, and an abuser is indistiguishable from a customer, then how can any SMS verification possibly help prevent abuse?  Well, if the abuser needs to create only one account, it cannot.  However, in many cases an abuser is trying to create tens of thousands of accounts.  Now imagine trying to buy ten thousand new cell phones at your local store every day.  It is not going to be easy.

“VoIP Numbers”

Now, JMP can easily get ten thousand new SMS-enabled numbers in a day.  So can almost any other carrier or reseller.  If there is no physical device that needs to be handed over (such as with VoIP, eSIM, and similar services), the natural tarpit is gone and all that is left is the prices and policies of the provider.  JMP has many times received requests to help with getting “10,000 numbers, only need them for one day”.  Of course, we do not serve such customers.  JMP is not here to facilitate abuse, but to help create a gateway to the phone network for human beings whose contacts are still only found there.  That doesn’t mean there are no resellers who will work with such a customer, however.

So now the targets are in a pickle if they want to keep using this strategy.  If the abuser can get ten thousand SMS-enabled numbers a day, and if it doesn’t cost too much, then it won’t work as a tarpit at all!  So many of them have chosen a sort of scorched-earth policy.  They buy and create heuristics to guess if a phone number was “too easy” to get, blocking entire resellers, entire carriers, entire countries.  These rules change daily, are different for every target, and can be quite unpredictable.  This may help when it comes to foiling the abusers, but is bad if you are a customer who just wants to create an account.  Some targets, especially “big” ones, have made the decision to lose some customers (or make their lives much more difficult) in order to slow the abusers down.

De-anonymization

Many apps and services also make money by selling your viewing time to advertisers (e.g. ads interspersed in a social media feed, as pre-/mid-roll in a video, etc.) based on your demographics and behaviour.  To do this, they need to know who you are and what your habits are so they can target the ads you see for the advertisers’ benefit.  As a result, they have an incentive to associate your activity with just one identity, and to make it difficult for you to separate your behaviour in ways that reduce their ability to get a complete picture of who you are.  Some companies might choose to use SMS verification as one of the ways they try to ensure a given person can’t get more than one account, or for associating the account (via the provided phone number) with information they can acquire from other sources, such as where you are at any given time.

Can I make a new account with JMP numbers?

The honest answer is, we cannot say.  While JMP would never work with abusers, and has pricing and incentives set up to cater to long-term users rather than those looking for something “disposable”, communicating that to every app and service out there is a big job.  Many of our customers try to help us with this job by contacting the services they are also customers of; after all, a company is more likely to listen to their own customers than a cold-call from some other company.  The Soprani.ca project has a wiki page where users keep track of what has worked for them, and what hasn’t, so everyone can remain informed of the current state (since a service may work today, but not tomorrow, then work again next week, it is important to track success over time).

Many customers use JMP as their only phone number, often ported in from their previous carrier and already associated with many online accounts.  This often works very well, but everyone’s needs are different.  Especially those creating new personas which start with a JMP number find that creating new accounts at some services for the persona can be frustrating to impossible.  It is an active area of work for us and all other small, easy-access phone network resellers.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

This month sees the release of Cheogram Android 2.10.10-2, based on a new upstream version and with many bugfixes and small improvements, especially around the Command UI. We also now have our own F-Droid repositories for quick update of official builds from us. We have a repository for releases and for those who want to help testing new features as they are developed we also have a repository for pre-releases.

Some JMP customers forward their calls to another voicemail service, or otherwise do not have need for the JMP voicemail.  This month we added an official option to the Configure Calls command that allows disabling voicemail completely for users who need this.

The default voicemail outgoing message has been changed from saying “a user of JMP.chat” to specifying what JMP number has been reached.  Anyone with a name or nickname or custom voicemail greeting set is not affected by this change.

As a small improvement for multi-account billing users, renewal transactions now specify what number is being renewed by the transaction.

Cheogram (and thus JMP) is now allowing all users to opt-in to Jabber ID discoverability.  This is to allow users to discover the true Jabber ID behind a phone number so they can upgrade to end-to-end encryption, video calling, high quality media sharing, etc.  This is opt-in only, and most features that make use of this are not built yet, but we wanted to give people the option to express their consent now.  This is done as part of the registration process.  For existing users, if you do not want to opt in, there is nothing you need to do.  If you wish to opt in, simply run the Register command, choose JMP, and it will ask for your consent (it will show if you use the bot as Current Value true for technical reasons, but do not worry it is set to false unless you explicitly answer yes to that question.)

This month we have also made some progress with the early test phase launch of our data-only SIM and eSIM program.  The program is slowly rolling out to the waiting list over the course of the next month, as we gather data and feedback from early users.  If you are interested, adding your Jabber ID to the waiting list is still the best way.  We have also heard the interest in having these available for people who are not otherwise JMP customers, and hope to have that ready for testing soon as well.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

One often hears people ask if a product or service is “good for privacy” or if some practice they intend to incorporate is “good enough” for their privacy needs.  The problem with most such questions is that they often lack the necessary context, called a threat model, in order to even begin to understand how to answer them.  Understanding your own threat model (and making any implicit model you carry more explicit to yourself) is one of the most important steps you can take to improve your privacy.

What is a Threat Model?

A threat model is a list of possible vulnerabilities, often with attached priorities.  In the context of personal privacy, this includes anyone who you might not want to learn private information about you, what private information you most want that party to remain ignorant of, and why.  For example, someone may not want their ISP to learn that they are communicating on LGBTQ+ forums, because their ISP is their school and their school might tell their parents, whom they are not yet ready to tell.  In this example they might say “I don’t want the school to learn” but because of the reasons it may actually be more important to say “I don’t want my parents to learn.”  So the ISP, the school, and the parents all represent potential vulnerabilities, with the parents as the most important.

Why is a Threat Model Important?

You cannot protect your privacy unless you know what your are protecting and what you are defending against.  Otherwise you may take extra steps to secure something not worth protecting, omit something you were unaware needed protected, or even protect something at the detriment of something you would have cared more about.  Privacy is not a slider from zero to infinity, you cannot be simply “more” or “less” private in some general abstract way.

For example, someone may be a part of a group of insurgents in a small country.  They wish the contents of their communication to be kept a secret from the current government if any one of them is found out, so they choose to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app.  They have prevented their mobile carrier and government from logging their messages!  They also secure their devices with biometrics so they cannot be stolen.  However, due to the unpopularity of this app in their country, when asked the carrier can immediately identify the current location of anyone using it.  When any of these people are brought in for questioning, the investigator forces the biometric (face or fingerprint) onto the device from the person in custody, unlocks it, gets access to all the decrypted messages, and let’s just say the insurgency is over.

So did the insurgents make “un-private” choices?  No!  For other people with different vulnerabilities, their choices may have been ideal.  But when their identity and current location is more at risk than the content of their messages, sending messages less-encrypted over a more-popular app or protocol (which could have all contents logged for all users, but very likely does not), and deleting them regularly from the local device in case they are caught, would have been more effective.

Privacy LARPing

“Privacy LARPing” is what happens when someone wants to be “more private” because it is cool and not because they have any well-reasoned need for privacy.  Believe it or not, this kind of use case also has a threat model.  The model may be more built on what kinds of vulnerabilities are currently trendy to defend against, but it exists nonetheless.  Putting thought and explicit description into your threat model can be a great way to seem even more “with it” so it’s highly recommended.  You may even identify real threats of concern (there certainly are some for everyone) and move beyond the LARP and into addressing your real needs.

How to Build a Threat Model

This is really an introspection activity.  Ask yourself what kind of entities are most concerning to you.  Estranged friends or lovers?  The other people at the airport or coffee shop?  Local police?  Local SUV owners?  Federal agencies?  Data brokers?  The list of people who may want to know more about you than you want them to is endless, so revisit your model from time to time.  Try to add to it and refine it.  This kind of work is never “done” because the scope is so vast.  Do talk to others and educate yourself about what the set of possible threats is, but do not take each new threat you learn about with the same weight.  Try to understand whether mitigations or new techniques are able to acheieve what you need, rather than blindly applying every “defense” without regard for context.

Welcome to JMP.chat! If you are looking for a simple guide on how to sign up for JMP, then you have come to the right place! We will be keeping this guide up-to-date if there is ever a change in how to sign up.

We will first start with signing up from within your Jabber chat application on mobile, where you will never need to leave the client to get set up. I will be using the freedomware Android client Cheogram to do this signup. To start us off, we will need to create a Jabber ID (or “JID”). Upon first opening the app you will be presented with a welcome screen where you can choose to signup using the built-in flow for chatterboxtown.us, or you can choose your own server.

We will choose “I need to sign up” for the purposes of this guide, but you are definitely free to choose whatever service you like, or bring your own! On the first screen of the server signup it will ask you to enter a username; this can be anything you want as long as it isn’t already in use on the server. After tapping Next, it will ask you to create a password for this account; length does not seem to be limited so create one as long as you want. Do not forget it, or use a password manager to create/store the password! Tapping Next again will log you in and offer to set an avatar for your account, you can set one now or choose to do so at a later time, if at all.

Once you are logged in Cheogram will immediately open the sign-up screen with the Cheogram Bot, where you can select which service you are planning to set up. Once you tap on the JMP logo you will be presented with a number search box. Here you can search by Area Code, State (or Province), City/State, Zip Code, or even a vanity pattern by placing the tilde (~) character first followed by up to 4 numbers. You will then be presented with a scrollable list of numbers to choose from, tap on one and then tap next to continue on. On the nex tpage you will choose how to activate your account, with the options of Credit Card, Bitcoin, Referral Code, Mail or e-Transfer. You must also choose which currency you will be using. After selecting one of the four payment options, the next screen will either ask for paymment by the chosen method with details on how to pay, or activate your account if you used a valid referral code.

Once your account has been activated you will be presented with the command UI of the bot, which has all of your account options, settings and details. Tapping “Show Account Info” will display your phone number, account balance and other useful information. Exiting from this view you should be presented with a popup asking if you want to enable Dialer Integration and grant Microphone permissions, tap yes to enable these features and be taken through the setup of dialer integration.

At some point you will also be asked if you want to download the default stickers for use in your chats, if you do tap “YES” and then it will prompt you for Media access permissions (this will allow Cheogram to access labelled folders inside the common media locations such as Downloads, Pictures, Documents, Movies). Tap to allow access permissions and Cheogram will download them in the background. Bonus: you can also download sticker packs from any other site and then load them into Cheogram!

Now that you have activated your account and set up dialer integration you are able to place calls, even from your native dialer, SMS or MMS with your contacts. To add a contact within Cheogram is quite easy with the contacts integration. Now that the bot has been added to your account contacts, your device’s contacts should already be visible when you tap on the “chat” icon to start a new chat, or you can do the following to add a contact to your Jabber server. First tap the chat icon, tap the “+”, then “add contact”. The first thing you should notice that is different this time with the dialog box that pops up is that it now has two selectable buttons: Jabber ID, and PSTN. The PSTN option makes adding telephone numbers for calling or sending SMS to very easy, just type out the phone number you wish to add to your contacts and then tap CALL or MESAAGE, depending on what you wish to do first. This will automatically format the phone number according to the locale detected on your device. If you need to add an international number, you will need to add the phone in the full international format to override the country code being automatically added. With the contact now added, you can either start typing out a message, or tap the “phone” icon that appears at the top to make an audio call to the contact. Images, videos and audio files can also be sent using a number from JMP.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

This month sees the addition of a new member to the team, you will see him in the chat as seki.  Seki joins us as a software developer and general team member, be sure to say hi!

Cheogram Android 2.10.9-1 has been released.  This release includes a major new feature: the Command UI.  The best place to see this feature is when talking to the bot at cheogram.com.  You will see a new tab labelled “Commands” that lets you interact with the bot using a nice UI instead of by sending specially-formatted chats.  This release also includes several fixes to URI display and copying, and is based on Conversations 2.10.9 upstream.  We have added a long-press menu on the list of all active conversations to perform quick actions (such as “pin to top”), added support for muting yourself from the dialler integration, changed the ringback sound to be more familiar to USA and Canada users, and various other small bugfixes.

JMP is actively working on providing cost-effective data-only eSIMs and SIM cards for users.  Pricing is not yet final, and there is some work to do before this is ready for the general public, but if you are interested please sign up for the wait list at the link above.  Our first launch will be with USA and Canada coverage, but other areas are possible in the future if there is interest.

This month we are also pleased to announce the launch of multi-account billing.  This feature allows customers to have one account be billed for all their JMP accounts, or those of their family.  To get started with this, please contact support and indicate the accounts that you want linked together.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

As foreshadowed last month, the new voicemail transcription engine is now live for all customers who have transcription enabled (which it is by default).  This should improve speed and accuracy, and bring support for many more languages to the system.  Let us know if you notice any issues with the new transcriptions.

From the beginning of the voicemail system we have supported a default text-to-speech greeting if a custom one is not set.  The name used in this greeting is sourced from the customer’s legacy vCard if they have one set up.  We now also support modern vCard4 and PEP Nickname specifications to get this data, which should result in it working for many more people with many more clients.  Check the voicemail FAQ for details.

Many new JMP customers are also new to Jabber in general, and so our signup process usually suggests one or more free-to-use volunteer-run Jabber services that one can sign up with to get a working Jabber ID.  These services are best-effort by volunteers, and this month one of the ones most popular with our customers experienced an extended outage.  The best protection you can have against any kind of outage at your Jabber service is to have your Jabber ID be attached to a DNS name you control.  With or without your own name, we also include the option for any JMP customer to get an instance hosted by Snikket at no extra charge.  Please contact support if you have any questions about this.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

This month the team has been hard at work on a new major feature for Cheogram Android: the command UI.  This feature will get rid of the need to configure your account with a clunky chat bot on mobile, replacing it with a fit-for-purpose native UI that can be viewed under the cheogram.com contact.  And because we are implementing it using only open standards, the UI will also work for other command-using entities out there.  The feature is not quite ready for first release, but if you want to come test a pre-release just drop by the chatroom (see below for how to get to the chatroom).

Almost since the beginning of JMP one of the favourite features has been our voicemail.  Reading your voicemails instead of having to “dial in” somewhere and listen to them is a real advantage for many users.  However, the transcription is far from perfect, sometimes being slow and completely missing support for any language other than English.  We are now testing an alternative engine with anyone who is interested, this new engine gets you the transcription faster and supports dozens of languages.  Come by the chatroom if you want to help test this out before we roll it out as a full replacement.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

This month our team launched a new product to help people looking to take even more control of their digital life by hosting their own social media instance.  Read about Togethr, what it is today, and a glimpse of our future plans.

JMP now supports SMS-only ports.  Landlines and most numbers with VoIP providers (but not numbers with most mobile carriers) are eligible to have JMP provide SMS/MMS messaging services for the number, while voice and other services would remain with the current carrier.  This feature is in Alpha, contact support if you are interested.

This month also saw the release of Cheogram Android 2.10.6-1.  This version merges in the latest upstream release of Conversations, as well as fixes for the contacts integration and playback for some media types (most notably 3GPP videos).

Finally, our integration with Snikket hosting is coming along.  For all of this year JMP customers have been able to get into the Snikket hosting beta with the promise of never having to pay for the JMP-using Jabber IDs they host there.  Now, JMP customers no longer need to contact Snikket staff to be put into the regular beta queue.  Contact JMP support and we can set you up with a Snikket instance directly.  We will continue to work on this integration until someday it becomes a fully self-serve part of signup.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.

• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.

• The Lemmy Community

• The Subreddit

• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Last week we launched a sister product from the same team that brings you JMP: Togethr.  Why are we launching a second product?  Why now?  What does this have to do with the mission of JMP in particular, or the Sopranica project in general?

Togethr is a managed hosting platform for small Fediverse instances.  It is powered by the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon, PeerTube, and so many others.  While there are several social networking solutions that build on XMPP (just like JMP does), and indeed we use one for this blog, we chose to go with something else for Togethr.  Does that mean we don’t have hope for XMPP in the social space?  No, rather it is an admission that the largest network for people to interact with in this way exists on ActivityPub-compatible software, and people need a solution they can use today.

As it grows, Togethr gives us the “skin in the game” motivation to bridge these worlds.  We are not the only ones interested in bridging the XMPP and ActivityPub worlds together, in fact the Libervia project is currently working on a grant to produce a first version of a gateway, that should be generally usable later this year.  We hope to eventually roll out an update that makes every Togethr instance seamlessly be both ActivityPub and XMPP without anyone needing to change their address.

Why not wait until “everything is ready” to go live with XMPP and ActivityPub at the same time?  Well, people need a solution.  Many people fleeing silos or otherwise being attracted to federated social networking find that self-hosting is too complicated, or they just don’t have the time to dedicate to it.  Many of these people end up creating an account on a giant volunteer-run instance, joining yet another silo (albeit a nicely federated one) run by admins they don’t know with financial and mental pressures they cannot understand.

Togethr gives people looking to federate their digital social networking experience full control without requiring systems administration knowledge or time.  Our team not only keeps the instance running, but provides support for users who may not be familiar with the software or the fediverse in general and need help getting everything set up.  However, there is no lock-in and people can easily move to another host or self-hosting at any time.  For example, if someone got an instance example.party and created the user person they would have address person@example.party just like you would expect on any Fediverse instance.  However, since they control the domain they could move to a different host or self-host, point the domain at the new instance, copy over their data, and no one has to “follow me at my new address”, everything just keeps working.

While we believe that single-user instances are the pinnacle of federation, Togethr does not limit the way people want to use it.  People may have family or friends they want to share posts with, who might not be motivated to join the Fediverse but will accept a personal invitation.  So every Togethr instance allows the customer to invite whoever they would like to join them on the instance, in order to smooth the onboarding for friends and family.  We hope that this can provide an option for people looking to take control over more of their digital life.