Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
Why? Because the Dutch national broadcasters keep plugging it as an alternative to Whatsapp.
Aside... Two apps keep getting mentioned as alternatives, Signal and Element/Matrix, but in MHRO both are not viable as replacements.
Signal: still a US app, CIA funded, provides their encryption backbone to Whatsapp, recommended by governments & FBI. Matrix/Element: Developed in Israel, with ties to IDF, preferred by NATO (NI2CE)
Signal is funded by the CIA now ? And I thought Element is in the UK?
I guess this means we're not switching to RCS then?
RCS is not an open standard
A lot of VPN servers in Netherlands may have something to do with it.....
I would have rather seen Element but hey, it's a step in the right direction.
Why? Matrix sucks as an instant messenger app, it's better as a Slack/Discord alternative.
It only sucks because you keep using Element. Its the worst client out there, if you account for "doneness"
What’s better? I’ve only used Element
And what would be the best? Element is certainly the most popular.
I don't like it at least because it's Electron. I had better experiences with Nheko and Cinny.
Only because I'm not aware of other decentralised Signal alternatives. That's on me.
XMPP
SimpleX is pretty rad.
Not yet, it lacks a lot of the features Signal has and does not even have a proper ipad ui yet, nor proper profile syncing between devices.
If it ever has these it might be useable by the masses, until then it'll be only the interest of privacy nerds.
Though really the most important thing is its lack of audits and a transparency report like Signal has. How can we be sure that its encryption/other security is up to standards or they don't hand over anything to cops/courts without these two things? These are what most messengers fail at, especially open source decentralised ones to be fair.
Yeah, it's a cool toy, but when I was picking a messenger to sell my SO on, Simplex failed my basic requirements:
Signal passed, so we went with that.
Simplex is still rad though, and I want to try building something on top of the protocol. I'm working on a P2P Reddit/Lemmy, and Simplex could be rad for DMs or something.
I didn't personally have problems with reliability (same as for XMPP, Matrix however has broken for me a few times). As for multiple devices - I just use two, with identical names and profile pictures, one on laptop and one on phone.
Yeah, Simplex is reliable. My point is that if I have a conversion with my SO on one device and want to continue on another, I can't really do that. So messages will come to one or another. When I tried it, they had a CLI tool to get that working, but that's not going to be acceptable for my SO.
So I went with Signal. It's easy for my SO to use and has strong privacy protections.
Indeed, but funded by VC which makes me uneasy about its future.
Huh, I missed that. From the announcement:
Also, funding the work to transition the protocols to non-profit governance model would not have been possible without the donations we received from the users.
Our pledge to our users is that SimpleX protocols are and will remain open, and in public domain, so anybody can build the future implementations of the clients and the servers. We are building SimpleX platform based on the same principles as email and web, but much more private and secure.
If they stay true to that, they're probably planning on building for-profit apps on top, while keeping the foundation free.
That sounds reasonable to me. Hopefully that happens.
Fair. I'll still be on watch, since venture capitalists are scum. Hopefully donations will eventually become stable enough for a revenue stream for them.
My concern is that they'd demand not just profit, but growth. But I wonder if they'd be able to go on by charging for commercial use - hosting servers, tech support, etc
Isn't Element based of Matrix? From what I've read, Matrix is a bit mid (not exactly mid, but I can't think of any other word).
It works as it's supposed to, though the handling of keys (strictly necessary for self-determined end-to-end encrypted chats) can be hard and annoying for people who have no experience. But once you get the hang of device confirmation you can use it seamlessly across multiple devices.
My dad just said in the WhatsApp group, why not move to signal. I tried moving friends and family before, but now that there has been anti meta media reports in some news sources. But especially reports on signal in almost every major newspaper and news source.
It seems not only a push because of privacy, but even more a anti big tech(especially us tech) and buy/use eu stuff push.
I don't mind the push I'm just curious if people stay on signal. Previous time there was a push to signal (during whatsapp technical difficulties and privacy push) people quickly want back to whatsapp.
Now my volunteer work, 1 friend and a family chat already moved to signal. The only thing I did was some explaining that you can just send images and so on. (That it's not something scary)