You can see firsthand that big groups actually do work. Take the Monero or Haveno Reto rooms as an example. They are both over 600 people.
It doesn't surprise me that,
SimpleX is under attack by corrupt liar Wired:
"Neo-Nazis Are Fleeing Telegram for Encrypted App SimpleX Chat"
https://www.wired.com/story/neo-nazis-flee-telegram-encrypted-app-simplex/
What DOES surprise me is the reaction of developer Evgeny Poberezkin,
Here's the quote from the article:
"And Poberezkin believes that the current limitations of his technology will mean these groups will eventually abandon SImpleX.
“SimpleX is a communication network, rather than a service or a platform, where users can host their own servers, like in Open Web, so we were not aware that extremists have been using it,” says Poberezkin. “We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance. We do not think it is technically possible to create a social network of a meaningful size in the SimpleX network.”"
This is surprising because Evgeny told us that groups could scale by reducing the reliance on a single invite link, so anyone could enter via any group member or "super members".
In fact, even from his own tweets, just 2 days prior:
"We agree that once group can scale, they will help growth."
Source: https://xcancel.com/SimpleXChat/status/1841561127320199583#m
This is the danger of doing cypherpunk stuff, with government money venture capital and registered LLCs. At the slightest push from the mainstream media, he changes his tune.
I like Evgeny. He's a good guy. And I DON'T blame him for trying to stop his company from being associated with bad actors. But we need to be honest here, he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be a cypherpunk, but collect the paycheck of a corporation.
What he should have said to Wired is: "This technology is like the printing press. It improves our lives and offers all of this freedom. But once it's made, the inventor can't control what people say. Do you really want to live in a world without the press, Wired?"
Discussion
They only really work in practicality. If you have big rooms with a lot of people sending messages constantly and you're away for more than a day, your app will be catching up for 30 minutes before it is fully caught up and that is absolutely not a good experience.
When I was trying to access it via the onion services, I did notice that. But trying to access it over the clear net, I have not seen that occur.
Well, that's the problem, everyone should be using the onion services if you're using it for privacy/anonymity. Session does it by default, and yet it doesn't ever get *quite* that slow. In fairness, Session did get bogged down pretty hard because of massive DDoS attacks a few months back, but when that's not happening, it's a lot quicker.
My biggest issue with SimpleX really is how it seems that messages take half an hour to catch up. Otherwise, the other flaws are either subjective or minor.
How do you find rooms. I had no idea I could find rooms.
type "SimpleX directory" into your search engine of choice. Once you are connected to it, you just simply type a word and press the send key and it responds with groups that match that word. The Haveno-reto group is not in the directory, but it is on rgeir official site.