A genuine discussion about the best FLOSS decentralized system to share poop emojis and videocall your dog.
Anyone can set up a server indeed, and you have no real way of knowing if you can trust them or not.
The official SimpleX chat website has this nice advice in this regard:
The servers have separate Anonymous credentials for each queue, and do not know which users they belong to. Users can further improve metadata privacy by using Tor to access servers, preventing corellation by IP address.
But IMHO if you need Tor to get the resemblence of metadata privacy, why use SimpleX at all and just use XMPP with Tor with works great?
To me this SimpleX is pure techno-solutionism that tries to solve a hypothetical problem and ends up as basically security LARPing and not solving many real-world threat-models at all.
I kinda get where you’re coming from, but I think your perspective might be too “techy”. I actually do use XMPP myself for the time being, but I have like half a dozen contacts on it. IMO because the set up process, presentation and apps fit a protocol born in early 2000s. Which might not bother some IT guys, but you’ll lose all the normies. SimpleX is on a whole other level it that regard, but keeps the benefit of being as secure, if not more. I have high hopes this app could become the signal killer we need.
We are together with you in favor of XMPP (I am with both hands)! You just “won’t sell” that kind of solution to very many people. We are already living in a zoo of messengers. We need to come up with at least two that will cover all the basic needs and offer sufficient privacy.
