Privately? Sure, basically impossible.
OP is saying they have to use it, and they want to most private option for their use case. Comments like this acting like privacy is all or nothing is a surefire way to stop people from being interested in online privacy.
To add to this, the Oracle Cloud free teir is totally capable of running a VPN- only probpem is they have credit card KYC.
Python: Gajim Doesn’t support Windows: Dino Outdated: PSI+
Yeah, XMPP has changed a loooott since then.
XMPP’s main problems at the moment are clients, in my opinion. There’s 3 main clients for PC; one is 100% python (including frontend) and breaks semi-regularly, one does not officially support Windows and thus cuts out a large portion of the community + doesn’t have as many features as others, and one lacks features and looks extremely outdated. The state on iOS is even worse as well, and Android is fine but could be better.
If you’re considering XMPP again, I’d recommend waiting a few months for Prose https://prose.org/ to fully release, it looks like it’ll improve the experience a lot.
To add to this, XMPP is much cheaper to host and offers basically the same features when it comes to what OP needs. I host Prosody and it uses so little resources you could probably get it running on the cheapest server you could find.
Probably far from the best option; but you could use 7zip? Put a 7zip portable exe & linux binary on the usb, put the regular contents in an encrypted .zip file, anyone with the password can decrypt. I assume there are much more secure options though.
always good to see people come around :)
you get so used to the toxic idea of people sticking to their guns no matter what on sites like these sometimes