I’m thinking of the things listed on the Privacy Guides real-time communication section
The difficulty of any non-mainstream chat app is getting other people to use it. On that list, Signal is the most probable to be recognized by people who don’t have a particular interest in privacy, so it’s more likely to get more people to use it.
besides that, and besides the lack of forward secrecy on matrix and session already mentioned by privacy guides, do some of these alternatives have worse security, privacy, or ux than signal in some way?
both have worse UX than Signal. pretty much all except Signal are lacking on this front. OSS developers are allergic to a smooth UX in general
Signal’s UX is NOT good unless you want to expose your encrypted conversations to a smartphone (of which far from all can run a private OS). All because of no desktop registration. You either have to use inconvenient signal-cli, or an Android emulator which creates its own troubles.
Dunno, it’s fine for me. As a messenging app it moslty gets out of my way and lets me communicate. It has all of the important functionality and creature comforts. Also, it already has some bloat (stories, whatever that crypto payment thing was/is). And the UI / UX is perfectly fine as is.
Although, as a dev myself, I hate UX work, it’s just boring and unfulfilling. I get why UX is often an afterthought. First it has to be functional, anything beyond that is secondary.
Signals UX is no better than SMS apps. People I’ve tried to convert all say the same thing.
~~But it’s still the most secure/privacy minded messenger. ~~
Matrix also does have a pretty big problem with meta data. By default it stores a ton of meta data (at least the reference server implementation does) and I am not sure if this is even a solvable problem without redesigning the protocol. When opting for an alternative to Signal, XMPP is probably the better choice.
That’s a good question. I wonder if there are available user numbers for them.
I imagine it’s regional and depends on what communities you are in. SimpleX chat seems pretty popular these days in privacy circles but I could see something like Briar being useful if traditional networks weren’t reliably available for example.
Why is Session always mentioned ? It’s an Australian company, in a land with zero constitutional oversight I’d be more inclined to think its a honeypot then a privavy focused chat app. Anom springs to mind as an example.
What’s your use case? Likeminded techie friends? Family members?
Signal works well as an alternative to the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp, even if it still requires a phone number and is centralised. Far easier to explain to the family instead of “oh well you can sign up on this website or this website or that website”.
Granted, if you want to host a small Matrix server just for the family, then go for it.
As far as I know Signal still requires a phone number to register an account. Since a while you can use usernames to connect with others instead of exchanging phone numbers.
The major one that concerns me is who is behind them. Even if we trust that their encryption is not backdoored, there is a lot of information that can be gathered just from the frequency of messages and who they are between.
If it came out that a three letter agency was running one of these networks, it would not suprise me at all.
Yeah but you cant really obfuscate your message destination and timing without using onion routing, and really thats just making it more expensive to compromise and run. That said other things here do make it seem like a honeypot…
Its fully open source though, even the server. Might not be that hard to fork it and let people host their own servers.
Lots of rumors, very little evidence.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you’re imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child’s birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they’re busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it’s because someone fucked up configuration on a site.
I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.
People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.
In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.
There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.
