What are the best private messengers?
Signal requires a telephone number. DMs in Nostr are encrypted but can’t you see who sends to who?
Or is it whom?…
Matsapulina’s case is hardly an isolated one, though it is especially unsettling. Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
Discussion
Signal, Matrix, Threema.
Matrix is a protocol, most popular matrix frontend app is Element.
Neither Matrix nor Threema require phone numbers and are end to end encrypted.
What about Sessions? Doesn’t require a phone number as well and allows to create a private key to reset or change device.
there is a shitcoin involved with their infra
Shit. Isn’t Signal as well or did they scratch their token?
Signal integrated mobilecoin for a payments feature built into the app which was an ICO shitcoin that signal founder Moxie was involved with. Moxie has since stepped down from signal.
Not great. Hate to see it, but not as bad as session fundamentally integrating their shitcoin into their protocol imho.
Everything has tradeoffs. The best part about signal is that millions of people use it.
That was a total mistake
Same problem i have with Signal, who keep pushing Moxie's own MobileCoin premined shitcoin
I found lokinet to be pretty cool, never really used the coin stuff though
Thanks. I like Signal—just wish they could figure out the usernames thing. Thanks for the other recommendations!
I encourage you to checkout https://simplex.chat as well
TSB has a group chat you can join. Simplex doesn’t even have usernames, frictionless onboarding experience. Has cool features like incognito mode which gives you a new nym for every group you join when it’s turned on, and allows you to run your own relay-like server. They’re rapidly releasing new features as well.
Link to TSB group: https://simplex.tsb.chat
Simplex seems interesting. Haven’t heard of them. What’s their business model?
How’s the user experience been?
As far as I can tell they are a FOSS project (AGPLv3) that runs on donations.
User experience when I first started using it about a month ago wasn't great. But they've since shipped a number of improvements and new features which has made the experience much better. Especially in bigger group chats like TSB.
It's a relative new project as I understand it, and is being actively developed, so I'm doing what I can to use and provide feedback (one of main devs is in the TSB chat).
Check out their github repo for more info on the project: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat
Thoughts on Keet?
Keet is very useful for video calls. Cool project. It is P2P, so no servers, which has three main implications:
1) increased censorship resistance
2) you expose your IP address to the person you are communicating with if you do not use a VPN
3) does not work great on mobile unless one of the people in the chat is also running Keet on their computer
Keet feels undervalued at the moment.
Hadn't considered your second point. I enjoy the desktop version for video chat but haven't had a chance to test mobile yet. Thanks for the feedback!
Keet isn't open source, right?
OK should have been open sourced already last December. Until now there is no source code available.
Furthermore the app is opening lots of request to some server, which looks wrong to me if it shall be just about a peer to peer communication app.
Not sure if one should trust such a project to handle our Bitcoins or Lightnings.
Any way to get mobile keet working like a walkie talkie?
Recently in New Zealand a cyclone left large parts of the country without power for days, lots of people had a cell phone with battery but no coverage, could get briar to send by bluetooth and WiFi if connected to a WiFi network, but couldn't get it working WiFi phone to phone.
Anyway to make a WiFi mesh network with keet?
I second Matrix, nheko is cool (it's open source and available through lots of linux package managers)
Snowden says to use signal if you can
I've been trying to use Keet but it's buggy. Battle to join rooms...
Replace each who/whom with he or him and ask yourself what seems more correct.
...can't you see he sends to him?
he = who
him = whom
Therefore:
...can't you see who sends to whom?
Whom
(I mean…. since you asked)
Session
I find this website useful: https://www.securemessagingapps.com
good summary - nostr p2p messges not necessarily by default fully private just encryoted
Only use the most secure messenger!
Check:
https://www.securemessagingapps.com
Rate the security:
🟩 = 3
🟨 = 1
🟥 = 0
Results:
1. Threema = 82
2. Signal = 77
3. Element / Matrix = 59
4. WhatsApp = 34
5. Telegram = 29