Alternative to Whatsapp? (thelemmy.club)

submitted 2 days ago by Hell_nah_brother@thelemmy.club to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk

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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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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] Hell_nah_brother@thelemmy.club 5 points 2 days ago

Jesus it’s even worse than I thought, thanks for the link.

this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025

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