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?
I wouldnβt invest time in Wire.
I got my entire family to use it seven or eight years ago. Since then, Wire has continually made changes that have only made the system worse for free users. I assume theyβre doing it to push people to the paid subscriptions, but it could also simply be developer incompetence. Either way, there isnβt a good alternative for a non-techie group of people, amd switching costs are high, so weβre stuck on it as it slowly degrades.
Notifications have become consistently more flakey over time, and none of our Android users can βShareβ media with the app anymore (it doesnβt show up as an option). Wire used to have an animated GIF lookup option built-in - sort of like fancy emojis - which disappeared earlier this year. Group video calls were disabled for the free tier last year. Itβs a slow enshitification, and Iβd recommend not investing time onboarding a bunch of people.
there isnβt a good alternative for a non-techie group of people
I find Signal to be very user friendly, what donβt you like about it?
Metadata. Requiring a phone number to register. And a hostile anti-federation, anti-API stance by Signal. Sure, you can run your own server, but you canβt connect to anyone in the official Signal network, and third-party apps are also disallowed.
Wire has the same problem, donβt get me wrong. Theyβve been resolutely refusing any third-party connections (mainly requests from Matrix bridge folks). But Signal isnβt an improvement on these fonts.
Signal is building straight alternative to WhatsApp. And it is very good because everyone who uses it can easily switch to Signal, without complications. Federation adds many new concepts (problems) for normal human, more latency and makes development way slower which is also very bad for mass adoption. And they are against only of 3rd party clients which use Signal in name. Molly exists, f.e. So Signal rocks π€π
Well, you said it yourself, Wire isnβt much different in that regard, so Signal is pretty much a one for one substitute.
I would like federation for Signal too somehow, in fact I use Matrix on the side, in particular with people I donβt want to share my phone number with, but that doesnβt prevent it from being a very solid option in and of itself
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.
No centralized services, please. Iβd vote for either XMPP or SimpleX. IRC will also work for me.
Havenβt heard of wire. Is the name a Lain reference, perhaps?
What does everyone think of session, from what I can tell its promising.
Yes please. Wire is definitely the best messenger currently avsilable, considering everything.
Itβs possible to disable encryption in Matrix. Some matrix clients dont even support encryption.
E2E Encryption is always on in Wire, no exceptions
avoid matrix https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-matrix.org/-/tree/master/part1
XMPP it is.
