Monocles, a #Conversations_im fork, is now making heavy use of LLM-generated code. Including its cryptography.
Meanwhile it hasn't backported critical security fixes that landed in Conversations (and other forks) over a year ago.
Use this information however you like.
In other news: Conversations is currently free of charge on both F-Droid and Google Play.
@daniel
This is a very well designed post Daniel, chapeau!
Aug 11, 2026, 2:39 PM@daniel It looks like this might be a violation of Codeberg's LLM policy.
@caten Indeed. There are other repos by the same user where this is even more obvious. I guess the fact that Monocles is still based on Conversations can open a debate around the word "mostly" in "You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by 'generative AI'-tools".
@daniel Oh, well that's disappointing. Guess it's time to get this AIslop off my phone. :flan_disappointed:
Meanwhile: Hello, Conversations! :flan_wave:
Aug 11, 2026, 2:55 PM@daniel monocles user here.
What proofs exist about this? I can't see any AGENTS.md or similar files in their repository. Just asking. I don't want to start a discussion here
@daniel Those of us who use Monocle do so because of its extra features, which Conversations lacks. When trying to attract new users to the system, if the app doesn’t offer features that are comparable to the ones we need to convince them to give up, it makes everything more difficult.
Conversations is a great project that stays true to the “belief” that it should be just a messaging app (without all the extras offered by the “competition”—namely WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal). Monocles, on the other hand, implements some extra features, such as reactions, statuses, and stories. Perhaps for those who’ve been with XMPP since its inception, this is a bad thing, but to attract new users from the real world—those who have no idea what XMPP is, what F-Droid is, or what open source is—the more features the app has that are similar to what they’re already using, the better our chances of convincing them.
That said, two more things: I hope Arne comments on this topic—maybe not here, but in the support group. Every time you, as a Conversations developer, “attack” the Monocles developer, you put yourself on the same (very low) level as the ArcaneChat developer who criticizes XMPP at every opportunity.
Conversations is open source; forks are welcome. If that’s such a problem, maybe we should consider switching to a different license.
@ismondo I'm not criticizing the concept of forking. There are several forks that manage to backport security fixes and don't add a bunch of AI slop onto the original code base.
I'm also not objecting the features you mention. For example Conversations has had reactions for a while now.
@daniel That's rather disappointing.