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Not sure, I've never used session but I think less tech savvy people would want to use signal because it is similar to Whatsapp, which they are used to.
Dear god, just don't.
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
Wasn’t this the blog who also got a response from session asking for a PoC and then they replied with (paraphrasing) “well it’s not my job to provide one”?
So everything in that blog post is theoretical at best?
As soon as I saw the furry reaction images, I knew this was going to be a detailed and informative blog post.
The real alternative to Signal for myself is SimpleX. The project is still in his beginning but it's the best instant messaging we could have once polished finished
As a centralized system, nothing has been shown to improve on Signal yet. For decentralized systems, I haven’t seen anything better than Matrix yet? SimpleX is slightly more secure, but harder to spin up and easier to break.
Session… there have been multiple articles written on how it is flawed and untrustworthy.
"Harder to spin up"? Hard disagree. Matrix's main server implementation is very resource-heavy, and alternatives like Conduit are not full-featured (and broke in some ways for me when interacting with mateix dot org). Meanwhile Simplex servers are pretty light and aside from a couple errors in the documentation that took a while to figure out, it has been easier than Conduit. And unlike Matrix, it has never broken for me so far.
Matrix is not decentralized but rather federated and distributed. Also synapse (matrix sevrer) have poor performance, especially when you federate your instance to others.
What do you mean poor performance ?
My synapse used to run on a 5€/mo VPS besides other stuff and ran fine and now runs on one of my on-premise servers (and not even my fastest, just some old ryzen 2700) with A BUNCH of other stuff besides it. Multiple users, a bunch of large federated rooms, bridges to other messengers ... And it just runs fine with 0 issues.
Are you talking about running a synapse server for like a thousand people or on absolute potato hardware or what is the issue ?
I'm not running a Synapse server myself so I can only speak on behalf of people I know who are. From what they told me they love the matrix protocol but it's not the same for the synapse implementation. A non-federated server can have somewhat great performance but a federated one was not worth it for them so they decided to switch to another alternative. They are not running for thousands of users more something like 40 I would say and while I don't know their server specs, I assume it's not a potato though.
Session is an Australian conpany afaik. The entire app reeks of entrapment. Australian laws are all about no privacy for you.
They recently relocated to Switzerland, after the AFP visited an employee, unannounced, at their home.
what in the fucking dystopia are they doing.
Briar doesn't even use a central server, all connections go through tor
Briar doesn't make sense to me because you're trading a central server for a central service... If tor is down, you can't message. It's the same POF as cellular, which is insane to me.
TOR isn't a centralized service, it's a distributed network.
It's also a specific procol, which can absolutely be blocked. I don't know where this notion that it's impossible to block tor because it was designed to be censorship resistant came from, but you can absolutely stop people from using it.
It's not even that hard and there's nothing end users can do about it if they don't know how to circumvent it...
Being able to be blocked is a completely different thing than being centralized service.
[...] there’s nothing end users can do about it if they don’t know how to circumvent it…
I mean, if users don't know how to circumvent something, by definition there is nothing that they can do about it.
However, unless this hypothetical censoring country is blocking all encrypted network traffic it is trivial to access TOR via a VPN or an SSH tunnel
It can be blocked, but blocking bridges is a constant whack-a-mole (especially now that they have Webtunnel which, while apparently not as robust as some dedicated obfuscation solutions, is still a noticeable improvement). My bigger problem with Briar is that both recipients have to be online to message, or you have to set up a "mailbox".
tor is decentralized, if someone's tor server goes down you just go to another.
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I think that SimpleX is more innovative and ground-breaking than Session.
But it's a difficult concept for the average person to not have an account, but everything is device oriented. Same problem with people not using gpg for email. Having to maintain a thing similar to a private key that's not memorizable like a username and password and back that up in case your device is lost. Is a big hurdle for many. And then additionally having to share a qr code or link through some external means for someone to connect with you rather than just telling them to download an app and enter your username HSS always been difficult.
So, IMHO, Signal has the best implementation possible with the level of usability that many nontechnical people expect in a chat application, even if it's not the most secure. I am interested to see how SimpleX solves these issues in the future, though.
Of course it is, that's the innovating part of it ! My opinion was that I rather use SimpleX if I wanted to switch away from Signal, if not I'll simply use Signal not Session. But my threat model isn't everyone's.
I think as people will be more educated on cryptography in there digital lives we will have better UX to the point of it not be as difficult as sending on e-mail in the late 80s. Innovation like Bitcoin, nostr, U2F, passkeys etc... will be more accessible over time. Today sending a message on Signal is infinity more easy, secure and private than the majority of e-mails of the 21th century.
Yeah, I just meant people are used to decades of using meaningful usernames. Having to use a cryptographic key has traditionally made it very difficult to get enough people to adopt to make it worth adopting yourself as a technologically savvy person. I never would have used Facebook in a million years if it wasn't for the fact that it was the only place I could get in touch with many people. Having to build your networks in-person is tedious for many people and sharing the codes securely through other means is cumbersome if you don't have an existing method for sharing.
Just like HTTPS needs several layers to make it work and still relies on an untrustworthy and corruptible thing like DNS to verify the destination and it's keys are the thing you're expecting to connect to. There's no secure way to share the route to your device electronically in a user-accountless system with no secure, trusted middleman translating names to addresses unless you do it in-person.
Use separate profile for different devices. Make a group when you chat with others.
Grr! Ok, but damned if I could get that to work! It seems like you can't use the desktop and mobile client at the same time! You have to scan a QR code to switch between them! And it has issues with firewalls and VPNs! Old and clueless here, maybe part of the problem. 🙁
I just have two identical but independent profiles. They also double as my remote copypaste buffer.
Yes SimpleX isn't mature from a UX perspective and that is due to it's innovative approach. If you need to have device sync and don't want Signal, Session could be a better optioon to you.
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There's nothing about Signal that requires savvines.
They probably meant tech-savviness compared to other Signal alternatives.
Although even then XMPP with modern clients is simple enough for my mom to use, so I don't entirely buy the "complication" argument either.
The main turnoff for me is that it is essentially impossible to selfhost - you use random nodes from the network, and to host such a node, you have to lock up a whole fortune (last time I looked I remember it being around $1500, might've changed) in their own cryptocurrency. They do promise returns, but I am skeptical - where would they take so much money to guarantee compensation for everyone within a sane amount of time? They claim it is against a Sybil attack, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier for a government/company to have more nodes in a situation when "competition" is reduced like this.
Selfhosting is kind of hard and labor intensive for some of us; had a lot of trouble trying to set up NextCloud on my QNAP (if that counts as selfhosting), and finally gave up.
Fair - I was referring to the fact that here it isn't even an option.
Also, XMPP or Simplex are very easy to set up, Nextcloud is indeed more complicated.
I used to think session is a way to go, but now..well simplex is literally all you need for communication with anyone
First impression: why another messaging system?
It may be fine, but what does it bring that Signal/Briar/Matrix/XMPP+Omemo doesn't have? Does it use existing standard protocol or encryption that's compatible with other messengers, to avoid fragmentation?
I think it has tor routing by default, so different in that way?
Briar use Tor by default as well for Internet connections, so I don't think Session is unique in that way. And both appear decentralized.
A difference is that Briar is Android-only, whereas session is available on more platforms https://sourceforge.net/software/compare/Briar-vs-Session-vs-Signal/
It's good that people are working on privacy-preserving tools. But I wish they'd coordinate to avoid fragmentation. Work on common/standard messenging protocols, so that people can talk to each other even using different software.
Currently it feels like going back to the 1990s-2000s, with ICQ/AIM/MSNM being all incompatible, and every single one being unable to communicate with a large fraction of your contacts.
Fair, I've never used Briar, so I was mostly responding to the others. I complete agree though, the fact that there are so many is super frustrating.
You can easily re-roll usernames in Signal, and profiles in SimpleX. I couldn’t find an equivalent feature in Session.
What do you think about OLVID?
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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