I’m thinking of the things listed on the Privacy Guides real-time communication section
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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
This is the complete and sad truth 🤣
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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. ~~
false
and how are they ordered in popularity?
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.
It doesn’t require a phone number anymore.
Edit: I was wrong. :p
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 username release is quite recent for those not participating in beta versions of Signal.
Ohh, I wasn’t aware that it was still necessary for registering.
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.
You can host Simplex server and clients
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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.
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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.
The only fix for that is for nobody to communicate, ever.
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I’m using Matrix/element. I rather not give my phone number, you see, which is must-have for Signal. I have installed the app in my family’s phones, and they were accepting, so all is well. I don’t need to communicate through private messaging with anybody else, so who cares if others don’t use matrix?
Yeah, about that. https://www.signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
That’s my point. The phone number IS STILL required to create an account at Signal!
I see.
You can always run a self-hosted version of Signal or a fork of it, then you can do whatever you want with it, including not using phone numbers.
Wait, what?! You can self-host Signal? Please send me a guide!
I’m not interested in running servers, in fact, my ISP doesn’t allow it anyway. I need something private that doesn’t ask for too much info off of me, and that’s why my solution was matrix, and not signal.
most people don’t run servers from their house, but something like a cheap VPS or similar.
I think Signal rolled out a username system that should let users communicate without having to share phone numbers
You still have to register initially with a phone number to be able to setup a username.
Let’s not forget that for those looking for alternatives, a key feature of signal is/was its SMS integration.
I use silence, a fork of signal.
- upside: it can still send and receive SMS messages!
- downside: nobody else uses it, so it only does SMS as a result.
Also it sadly hasn’t been maintained for years
Downsides of Signal alternatives compared to Signal?
I guess that anything out there performs better and faster syncs than Signal… so much for the great Signal.
