To answer your edit: No. They use different encryption algorithms.
I've used Signal since it first came out as TextSecure like 10+ years ago.
It doesnt have fancy bells or whistles, but its work well for me and good enough that ive gotten elderly family members to use it too
Signal. It's changed a lot. For the better.
Contains proprietary code. I recommend Molly-FOSS instead.
Upvoted.
Appreciate the reply, but I don't mind some proprietary code. There are very few reviews of open code by respected bodies (I'm writing in generality here). I'm certainly not qualified to review code. Just being open is only the beginning of the journey.
As we've seen with some open software recently there are some active hackers successfully targeting open software because it is open. Such exploits are not always discovered in good time.
https://thenewstack.io/why-so-much-open-source-software-is-vulnerable-to-hackers/
https://thehackernews.com/2025/01/github-desktop-vulnerability-risks.html
Etc etc.
I place store by the warrant responses and action of government entities against some software.
Thanks. You're not wrong, and I appreciate the well-written response. Some might say you are defending/advocating proprietary software with this stance, but I don't think there is a clear answer either way that applies to every circumstance.
Thank-you for your kindness. And it is really kind!
I'm old so my view of prop software is rooted in the change of early Microsoft et al bringing real change to the dubious parasitic entities that they are today. I watched it slowly happen and have been delighted and contributing in a small way with Linux since the turn of the century.
RedHat had been sold to the 'no-one ever got fired for buying IBM' (I still can't believe that they believed that that was a winning slogan). In these trying times the love for open source isn't translating into enough cash; average people are stretched.
I can't wait for the leaders in my country to stop pandering to the world's oligarchs and serve the people that elected them.
Signal for security standard and ease of use, which is essential, if You want to use it with non techy people.
Simplex for anonymity, You can download it, share chat and start talking without registration.
Simplex for anonymity, You can download it, share chat and start talking without registration.
It ate my battery when I installed it. Do you use it on a daily basis? What's your experience with its battery consumption?
Have it on always on, with small scale friends and family use. Don't find it too draining, updates have improved the battery usage
I'm in one room with 1,500 people and it uses about 7% of my battery. Mind you, that is a lot for a messenger. But I can deal with that.
Signal
I will second the others that only suggest Signal or a variant of Signal like Langis or Molly. Everybody has each other's phone numbers, go with Signal so people don't need any other contact information.
Never heard of Langis before :)
Personally I'd go with Signal. Matrix has a certain jank level IME, for example rooms can get desynced between homeservers and the only way to fix is to create a new room and abandon the old one. Not sure how often that happens for small scale use though, I've only seen it in large rooms.
No bridges are not end 2 end encrypted. The best you can do is host the server and bridge in your own home and thus have the bridge "end" in a secure location.
If your friends and family are not very technical, then Matrix is probably a bad idea as it tends to be quite in your face about all sorts of technical issues especially with the encryption keys and so on. It works ok usually once everything is set up though.
XMPP is IMHO the better option as the mobile apps are easier to understand and the e2ee usually works out of the box and stays out of the way unless you specifically want to mess around with it. For a friends & family server I recommend setting up https://snikket.org/ or rent a server from them cheaply.
There are also good bridges for XMPP, but setting them up requires more understanding of self-hosting.
I second xmpp + omemo, and would caution that as far as I can remember matrix leaks significant metadata when syncing between instances/services.
As a personal decision I got away from signal (molly in fact) more than a year ago.
I'm also keep jami working with my family, particularly for things not requiring immediate response. It's a different beast, since it's p2p, but there's no server associated to it, no matter if decentralized or not. It's easy as well, just not as responsive, in particular if looking for immediate responses... I like and keep both, hoping jami improves.
Yup echoing most here. Unless you or someone you are paying are willing to put time and effort in to maintaining Matrix, go with Signal. It's like WhatsApp but actually secure and is appropriate for the vast majority of use cases.
I just moved to Signal and have convinced most of my family and many friends to join. It is very secure, non-profit and doesn't share much personal data (the least of the main messaging services) and most of my luddite family has been able to figure it out.
I got my family onto signal. The app is basic, but that is kinda a benefit when getting half-blind 90yo's onto it.
I switched from hangouts when they killed group calls by trying to be zoom.
No regrets, but group calls sometimes dont ring, which is annoying. Mostly good though.
Signal is the easiest with true end to end encryption with keys stored on the endpoints only.
Recommending to friends and family means Signal. With a phone number they can start using the gold standard for encryption from the get go.
I'd consider Signal to be the gold standard of secure communications.
You can describe it to them like WhatsApp, except it's private, secure, not Facebook-owned, nonprofit so it can't be bought or sold, etc.
Here's the blog post that I share with my friends comparing Signal to iMessage and WhatsApp when they ask me about it.
It usually answers most of their questions.
signal or SimpleX.
I'm starting to move away from Matrix, primarily because its metadata is not encrypted. So you might have a message that's encrypted, but the emoji reaction like a thumbs up is not encrypted, and the time it was sent and received is not encrypted, and who it was sent from and to is not encrypted.
Not to mention that in Matrix, private key management for encryption in rooms and stuff like that is quite frankly a pain in the ass. Even I as a cryptocurrency user have trouble making sure that my keys are properly stored without fucking them up.
I would not recommend my friends or family members use it for these reasons.
Rolled up scrolls attached to foxes
Listn, I don't mind occasionally moving your scrolls back and forth, but if you would attach them to my back instead of my legs it would make it a lot easier OK.
People will dislike this:
The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.
All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!
Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.
I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.
There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.
Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.
That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.
In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Make sure it meets your needs of course
Sorry but there is no way I'm using imessages so many people I know have an android phone so that just won't work. It's closed source, has no encryption at all when contacting anyone who doesn't have an iphone. And it's apple, and apple sucks. iMessages is half the reason why I became anti capitalist it's such a great example of the pitfalls of capitalism.
No worries, I didn’t see that you were looking for open source or anything.
Are you mostly worried about the compromised American cell (and by implication other nations 👀) network or something else?
little barrier to entry
$1000+
So true lol.
The barrier to entry was intended to refer to others since it’s already installed on over half their phones to start with and most people are gonna be using a messaging program on their phone.
When there’s above a 50% chance the person you’re talking to is already using a particular encrypted messaging program that’s the lowest barrier to entry.
The barrier to entry always refers to other people because the hardest part of establishing private communications has always been convincing other people to actually do it.
If you really wanted to get on imessage for the least amount of cash out of pocket possible, the bluebubble bridge application random letters person mentioned is ~$100 for an old mac, and tbh that’s a high estimate in my experience. People are just giving those things away nowadays.
But most people would be excluded because they don't have an iPhone or even funds to buy one! And would have no real way to participate! Maybe some older secondhand models would go below $300, I don't know, but it would be weird to expect a person to buy a second phone (and an older, more worn-down one at that) just to converse with you. Even $100 is also a pretty high price just to bypass an arbitrary restriction.
There is a reason the most popular messengers are cross-platform. So the aim must be that.
If you’re in america almost sixty percent of phones are ios.
If you’re choosing an encrypted chat and sixty percent of people are already using it then that’s the one you choose. The hardest thing is compliance and you’re almost two thirds of the way there if you just pay a hundred bucks (or scrounge up an old mac) and run the bridge app. Then you use signal for everything else.
I think we’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m not worried about a universal solution because I know I’m not getting to 100% compliance with any solution so I suggested the one that immediately fixes the majority of the problem. Having had to convince people to exchange pgp keys twenty five years ago, I’d pay a hundred bucks to not have to deal with that for two thirds of the people I know.
Think about it this way: if you were starting from scratch would you rather have to convince all your contacts to move their chats with you to signal or matrix or whatever or would you rather have to convince four out of ten to do that?
Obviously you’d pick the easier thing because no matter how committed you may be to not using proprietary software or big corporate apps or fragmented ecosystems you actually have to accomplish the goal of chatting with people using encryption and all the process compliance and wheedling and convincing and tech support for family members is time you could be spending talking about gardening, sharing baby pictures, plotting to overthrow the government or whatever you would normally be doing.
Sixty percent still leaves about a half excluded and left without a cheap and convenient way to participate. You think it is fair in any way?
Also a hundred bucks is a very steep price just for a messenger. Even Threema's cheap price is seen as an adoption hurdle, this would make people wonder why you can't just use a free app. Worst-case scanario, they'd just go back to Whatsapp.
You'd want to make adoption as seamless as possible - and yet you're telling people they have to pay a big price (in a crisis time especially) and set some weird bridge up? They would think "Why can't we just use something botherless?"
i use simplex with people i used sms with before, and matrix for everything else
I don't use messengers with vendor lock-in. Therefore Matrix and XMPP see: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
Both self hosted on a Raspberry #freedombox https://freedombox.org/
Matrix has all the features like Slack and WhatsApp and XMPP Conversations: the very last word in instant messaging.
Matrix, xmpp, simplex. Do not use Signal or any service with centralized servers hosted in a 5 eyes country.
Seconding simplex. Having a built in way to obfuscate IP is very nice. But its more for privacy extremism and small group chats for people in vulnerable situations, matrix is best for most situations e.g. community and interest groups. I also had some ease with setting up simplex with my grandma, funny enough. Not needing to make an account made it much easier for her.
Hope Lemmy gets a simplexchat field one day!
I got my mother on XMPP - if you set the person's account up, Conversations is as easy to use as Whatsapp or Signal, but doesn't have the central server dependence.
Signal for your family (mostly due to interface), Matrix for online communities, and SimplexChat if you're trying to be a privacy extremist. I did have some success with setting simplexchat up for some old people over the phone because they didn't need an account.
If no one's on any kind of private messaging platform, SimpleX is good and fairly easy to use. But I mostly use Signal just because everyone's on it.
Also consider your threat model; Signal is appropriate for just casual personal conversations, but it is centralised and not self-hostable. The servers are run by the Signal org who are based in the US. If the potential of message metadata (which can be used to eg create networks of who's messaging who) getting into the hands of the US state could create significant issues for you, you may want to at least find either a decentralised or self-hostable solution which is not so US-centric. I assume, though, since you're talking to these people on non-private platforms, that these are not super sensitive discussions anyway.
Just a note that there's an in development fediverse app called 'sup' by the creators of pixelfed. It's not released yet but is going to be encrypted and Open Source. https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113912441928236882
for me it's xmpp. now that monal on ios has almost reached feature parity with conversations on android, there's no reason xmpp shouldn't be the go-to alternative to whatsapp.
I don't think signal is the answer. a centralised service susceptible to all the things wrong with whatsapp. matrix is bloated. push notifications on simplex android is still sketchy.
and i dont buy the argument that onboarding is too complicated these days. most people can make an account for anything they feel is worth it.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)