Hello, I’m doing some research for my family and friends to help them navigate the tech space and recommend them some better privacy focused alternatives. I’ve been stuck with the most important piece: instant messaging.
Ideally I would like something:
- decentralised
- Foss
- Possibly not tied to phone number
- Encrypted
- Not funded by an US or Israeli company
- Fairly easy to use by not tech people
If I manage to convince them, I can’t make them change in a year or so, the alternative needs to be future-proof.
- Signal: is Foss (not completely) but not decentralised (one “wrong” update and we are back to square one) + very much american funded
- Matrix: foss and decentralised but funded by an Israeli company (sorry I really can’t)
- Telegram: phone number registration, not fully encrypted, server proprietary
- Theema: server side not open source
- IRC: no video/audio calls, not encrypted
That leaves me with SimpleX and XMPP, I think (I don’t know much about them). What do you guys use/recommend?
I’m reading [this wiki page].(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_protocols?wprov=sfti1#Table_of_instant_messaging_protocols)
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After years of going full degoogle and privacy oriented I found that the best option regarding your criteria is not necessarily the good one. Non-techy people will toss aside anything that’s not as easy to use as GAFAM tech.
IMO “good enough” is often the best way to go, rather than “perfect”.
In the end, Signal is a pretty good compromise (even though your objections are completely valid).
I agree, luckily for me some close friends and family will listen to me and try weird stuff (my mum has successfully been converted to 🐧). I will probably give 2 options: the “good enough” (as you said probably Signal) and the “tech recommended” (?).
Signal is “easy” onboarding, just install and follow a wizard. I still have trouble convincing people to just download the app and try which is the hurdle. Most who bother to try it end up liking it and sticking with it since it’s easy and familiar to SMS but nicer. The people who don’t want to bother just never mention it again, or make up some excuse “won’t run on my phone” (it’s an iPhone) to stop the conversation.
Signal presumably has more users than all others combined. Don’t make it too diffucult. You better might switch them to a messaging app that appears to be useful to their other contacts too, not only for messaging with you and each other. Other alternatives: https://buy-european.net/en/alternative-to/whatsapp https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/whatsapp
If I recall correctly, the protocol is funded by an israeli company, but most clients (and I’m pretty sure some server implementations) are not.
Unfortunately, there is no perfect option. Matrix and signal are the least-worst.
No there is no perfect option really but this:
the protocol is funded by an israeli company
Personally, it makes my skin crawl, I really don’t want anything to do with them.
It annoys me too. XMPP is probably your best bet, it’s just very janky.
What about Delta Chat? In my experience easy to get started with for non-techy people. I managed to force my wife and kids to switch to Delta when I quit iMessage and got a Fairphone/eOS phone.
WTF that’s really nice! Do they use just the email protocol? Are they interoperable with email and xmpp?
I really like the list of funds they received on their website. Big 🆙
I use matrix, and it’s very good, where did you hear that it’s funded by Israel i’m curious to learn, about XMPP I heard that conversations is a good XMPP client however XMPP is very fragmented, and some clients adopt protocols and some don’t, like Wayland on Linux
I just googled that as well. The following site has some links: https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
I don’t think fragmentation is a big issue in practice. I used it for quite a while and it was mostly fine. And I mean the same thing is true for Matrix. Lots of clients don’t support threads, …or you have to wait for them to implement the new way of fetching attached images or half the images just won’t load… There are incompatibilities with the verification and some libraries, or someone can participate in a voting and someone else can’t… You’d live on a very old room version or someone is inevitably going to complain. And 90% of clients don’t support multiple accounts so I cant differentiate between private and everything else. Then we have Spaces which aren’t exactly mainstream either… I think Matrix is even more fragmented than XMPP. They also had that, but most of those annoyances were solved in many clients like >10 years ago.
Jesus it’s even worse than I thought, thanks for the link.
I didn’t know as well, I just checked Wikipedia. Funded by Amdocs.
I understand that matrix.org organisation is funded, the protocol itself is implemented by nobodies. Just don’t use matrix.org, there are plenty non-political reasons for that. Host your own, like I do.
Looks like there are some problems with data and decentralisation, even if you self host. The link the other user posted is really interesting.
I use a combination of XMPP and Signal. They do the job well enough.
XMPP is rock stable and just works.
SimpleX has a more feature rich client than Conversations for XMPP, but the whole ecosystem is developed by a single company with external funding.
Ok, but xmpp still needs servers owned by others right? Who are the trustworthy servers run by?
That’s up to you really, I run my own. I’he heard good things about conversations.im and https://snikket.org/start/
For free ones, https://providers.xmpp.net/ is a starting point. If I’d have to choose, I’d probably go with Project Segfault, they have been hosting a lot of privacy friendly services over the years.
You can run your own and even select from multiple different servers you can use, or if you really want to you can write your own, the specs are out in the open. Check XMPP software selection for a start.
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned Session yet. Open source, not based on phone numbers, decentralised (uses Tor), based in Switzerland, otherwise it’s a lot like Signal. Exactly what you’re after, really
I didn’t understand the cryptocurrency part… is the application doing some mining on the phone??
It doesn’t run on the OG Tor network itself as I understand it - people run their own specific Session Nodes that act as the “tor-like” backbone.
The crypto part is because to set up your own node, you proof of stake a bunch of their coin, and if your node is found to be unreliable or blatantly malicious your stake is locked (or even forefitted? Not sure about that part)
Simply use Matrix or Signal. Matrix is fully open source, why do you care who funds it? Open source belongs to everyone.
Have you tried Delta.Chat?
Should tick a lot of boxes
Jami is open source, Canadian and P2P (not dependent on a company’s servers).
https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
Unfortunately I had quite some battery drain with SimpleX on Android, so unless that’s fixed by now, I’d recommend XMPP out of your list. But have a look at the messenger-matrix as well. They mostly include technical aspects, though. Not relations with countries. I use Matrix. And Signal for the friends willing to leave WhatsApp behind. But neither of those are perfect at all. I’m regularly having all kinds of small little technical annoyances with Matrix these days, and Signal needs a phone number, which I don’t like at all.
I posted on this a while ago. Doesn’t just apply to Signal, but all “encrypted” messaging apps.
Also interesting comments
