We’ve been using Session ( https://getsession.org ) for the Damus translation team and it seems to work pretty well. It’s a fork of Signal and doesn’t require phone number or email either.
Discussion
Somehow the app seems impervious to public perception. Any mention of it just dissipates into nothing.
Looks great 👍
I've used Session for some specific use cases and it's worked well, although it's not really been a fork of Signal for the last three years. They started from the same codebase as Signal in 2019, but the team has made it clear that it's deviated significantly since then. It seems like it became a major selling point for them, as they didn't believe Signal's protocol was a good fit for their decentralized environment anymore.
They migrated from Signal's encryption protocol and developed their Session Protocol, dropping Perfect Forward Secrecy behind along the way (which SimpleX grants). Relating to identifiers, the main difference between Session and SimpleX is that the IDs are fixed in Session between users you communicate with, while they can be random and require no identifiers in SimpleX to connect in the first place.
There's more that differs, including their decentralization and server ecosystem from what I understand. I believe SimpleX provides a structure for more interesting growth, but that's just my humble, unsolicited opinion, and based on what I value I guess 😂. I see it being more interopable and aligned with the goals of nostr. I'm sure the founder of SimpleX (Evgeny) could expand even more on their differences if people wanted to know.
Just thought I'd share in case you're interested, here's some links relating to Session's move away from Signal:
https://getsession.org/blog/session-protocol-explained
https://getsession.org/blog/session-protocol-technical-information
And here's an Opt Out episode from nostr:npub1tr4dstaptd2sp98h7hlysp8qle6mw7wmauhfkgz3rmxdd8ndprusnw2y5g with Evgeny about SimpleX. Really interesting stuff: