I use wire (wire. com) for daily chatting. I like it but I couldnβt find any good communities in wire. In session, or simpleX, there are privacy (and other) groups in which anyone can participateβ¦ Can we start a privacy group in wire so we folks can also hang around?
Update 2023-09-28
Edits include addl feature discussion, but mainly an update on Session.
Nope. Maybe?
- Session looks very promising, and Iβm trying it right now with my wife. Sheβs much better at catching software warts - if she starts using it more than the N other ways (she currently has Jami, Element, SMS, and now Session on her phone), then Iβll know itβs a hit. It is lacking a critical feature for phone use: editing previous messages, and itβd be nice if it had Jamiβs location-sharing. Security and anonymity looks good.
- Matrix is promising, but encryption is still extremely brittle, and prevents me from inviting non-technical F&F.
- SimpleX is promising, but without multi-device support, itβs a non-starter.
- Jami is promising, but I canβt get the client to work on Arch (it just segfaults), and the answer to my ticket was βArch isnβt supported.β In my case, itβs because my Qt was newer than their required version - it compiled, but just segfaulted. I lost interest at that point. Notifications are unreliable, as is message delivery. It fails the wife test. It does have a great realtime location sharing feature, which is super handy for, e.g., picking people up at the airport, but thatβs not enough of a killer feature top overcome the reliability issues.
- Tox - Shoot. I try Tox every once in a while. I know that I uninstalled it once because the mobile app sucked my battery down, but I donβt remember if it has some fundamental flaw. I think it doesnβt support multi-device? Iβll have to check it again.
- Lichat looked interesting, but Ocelot hasnβt been updated since '21; itβs a small project with not a lot of documentation beyond the spec
~I may have looked at Session at one point, but donβt remember why I put it in the No category. Iβll have to review it again.~ See my update at top. Session is currently a contender.
XMPP may be the elephant in the room. I used XMPP for years, back before Google supported it, and after. I know a lot of people advocate it, and I think itβs a reasonable option; itβs certainly well-established. It leaks a lot of metadata, but then, it wasnβt designed with security in mind - all of the security has been bolted on after the fact, frankenstein mode. So has multi-participant chat. In fact, most features have been tacked on, and I guess thatβs why I avoid it these days. Nothing seems well-integrated and reliably functioning. But YMMV; it may be the best option at the moment.