Signal just proven again that the feds cannot get any data.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2021
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Privacy
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I wonder how much longer until governments require corporations to Know Your Customer, especially if they offer crypto.
Afaik there was some shady stuff with Signal. Idk if it's even true, but I think that centralisation just sucks for privacy and just by having common sense this is an issue. I think that signal it's a pretty good alternative compared to Whatsapp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger or SMS (if someone uses that) . But I think that we need to move to a decentralized alternative.
Yeah signal is good, but the thing I dislike about it is that its centralized and you don't actually have the option to run your own server. Maybe one of the forks of session like session is a good alternative. But I feel like Signal is the best alternative to things like Whatsapp and Facebook messenger and it is arguably a lot more user friendly that matrix and XMPP.
Compared to the Conversations XMPP client the main "advantage" of Signal in regards to user friendliness is basically that people got used to using their phone numbers for messengers. But that is a bit like printing you phone number on your t-shirt and claiming that is is easier for people to contact you that way...
Also there is Quicksy.im which is Conversations but with a phone-number... if you really want to remove your privacy like that.
Conversations is indeed a far better alternative here...
- It uses a very popular protocol, xmpp
- works with e2e encryption for text, files, video, audio,
- it can be self hosted,
- it's fully open source, and has a couple of popular forks (like blabber)
- devs got no funding from intelligence agencies (like matrix has)
- it's highly efficient (unlike matrix) and runs on the cheapest of vps servers / raspberry pi
You can run your own Session server, if you stake it. But Session is about relaying messages, so its not an exclusive server. And because a node is staked, I'm skeptical where Lokinet/Oxen is going (sounds like there's eventually going to be a business model somewhere in there).
I think the future needs to go towards something serverless. P2P has its drawbacks (offline messages and battery usage). Server based communication has dependence on someone else's infrastructure. Blockchain might be a solution, combined with either something like Signal Secret Sender, Whisper, or Tor/Lokinet/I2P/relay. Not sure...but I believe it can be a lot better than what we have.
Matrix and XMPP is just not streamlined enough for mass adoption like Signal is. If Signal removes the phone number requirement, that will be HUGE. But keep in mind, Signal could easily be blocked.
I think the ability to run your own server could be added in the future, if they want that. The beauty about software is that most stuff can be fixed.
I would like to thank the good people of Lemmy here, who helped me avoid the logistical nightmare of setting up a matrix server, and instead choose xmpp. It's been so fun and easy to get my family on my xmpp server using Conversations/blabber app. Resource usage is minimal, and it works very easily.
~~Matrix~~ edit: Element aims to be more of a replacement for Slack/Discord than WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram though.
I think XMPP is probably the better replacement for the latter. With apps like Conversations/Blabber.im and Siskin for iOS the "personal messenger" experience is quite good these days (but not perfect), and with e2ee coming to Movim, there is a strong contender for a convenient to use XMPP webapp as well.
Funny thing is, every time Matrix is proposed as an alternative for Slack/Discord, people say the opposite, i.e. that Matrix is more a replacement for WA/Signal/TG.
After using Matrix for a while, IMO it's closer to a personal messenger, since you have less focus on collections of channels (Servers, Categories) and more on single groups and PMs. True, there is Spaces and Threading in Beta, but that is a pretty recent development in the Matrix world.
But the lines get blurrier anyways, so I don't think it's useful to discern between these two kinds of messaging platforms any more
Ok, maybe I should have said Element, i.e. their official Matrix web-client. Which is clearly much closer to Slack/Discord and also aimed at being a team-chat client like that. You can argue that it isn't a very good one, but even more clearly it isn't a good personal messenger like WhatsApp etc.
I share your view that XMPP is superior to Matrix as replacement for WhatsApp (which actually uses XMPP internally but does not participate in federation) in the context of personal/direct 1:1 messaging.
The reason, though, is more technical. Matrix works like a globally synchronized database - it duplicates the message history to all participants of a chat and is stored on the server which makes it incredibly complex, expensive and error prone. XMPP rather works like a simple relay - the message is only stored until delivery. This makes the server part way more lightweight and adminstration easier as you don't run out of memory as fast as with matrix. (See more)
Regarding the clients I don't like either. Element is too Slack-ish and the more modern clients like FluffyChat are quite buggy. Conversations one the other side looks outdated with a design from like 2015. I would like to see it adopting more recent iterations of material design such as cards or rounded corners.
After all both protocols unfortunately leak considerable meta data :/
Very good break-down.
Besides the meta-data leaking, I would always use xmpp Conversations app over anything else. I don't find it too outdated UI wise, but I'm no expert in this area. It does feel intuitive - somewhat like watsapp. But the blabber fork does a sligthly better job in UI
Matrix works like a globally synchronized database
And, among other issues, this is why it leaks tons of metadata and allow for easy correlation attacks and social graph discovery.
I constantly see this argument but let's face it, it's very unlikely that enough people will ever switch to something like Matrix. I like decentralization and the matrix protocol is brilliant, but it brings many problems:
- Many people will have to care enough to host their own servers (which now is not remotely as common as it should be) otherwise everyone will just use the biggest severs, weakening the advantages of decentralization
- It's way harder to implement new features that people care about
- People are not used to Element's UI and there aren't clients good enough to compete with Telegram, Whatsapp or even Signal
- The performance wouldn't be as good exept for the biggest servers, causing centralization again
- If people don't use it, it becomes useless, which is the same problem other alternatives have. This means that people must want to change naturally to it, meaning clients, ease of use and performance would have to be at least on par with what they're using at the moment
On the other hand, Signal:
- Is very similar to the way Whatsapp works, which is what most people are used to
- The Android and iOS clients are getting better with time (the desktop client needs to abandon electron but it's hard with only few developers and it's a lot of work)
- The protocol is robust and audited
- It doesn't leak metadata, as Matrix does
- Even if it's centralized and Signal runs their servers on AWS, the only useful information third parties could gather are timestamps and the recipient of the message, not even the sender
- It's easy to jump on Signal, the network of contacts already exists and you wouldn't need to ask for usernames or email addresses
- Don't foget that the clients and the server are open source, and even if the Signal Foundation decides to stop working on Signal, shutting down the services (VERY unlikely), we could fork the projects and bring them back up
Centralization can be problematic, but if it's done correctly the pros may outweigh the cons, and in my opinion this is the case for Signal, but I'd happy to be proved wrong in future
The performance wouldn’t be as good exept for the biggest servers, causing centralization again
In my experience, self hosted matrix is way faster than matrix.org ^^
It depends on what hardware you host it. Most people can't affort powerful hardware. My experience with self-hosted matrix on a raspi 4 and on an old desktop pc hasn't been great, and the problems grow with the number of users
Use both because neither are perfect
yeah right there's no way to convince the signal users I know to switch platforms yet again. I tried getting some to switch to xmpp which is much simpler than setting up a matrix account and they wouldn't do it.
You're basically competing with "Simply download the app (Signal) and use it." That's a tough thing to motivate anyone to do, and I can't articulate in a convincing way to anyone I know why it's better. In practical terms as far as they're concerned, Matrix are XMPP are not any better and my preference that we didn't use siloed centralized services is purely abstract to them.
I chose matrix over signal because of the centralization problem. That being said, I could convert some friends and family to use matrix but a lot of people went to (or already were on it) signal.
After a few months I decided to install a signal bridge on my matrix server so I guess I'm having kind of best of both worlds, even though it's not a perfect solution, it is one acomodating both sides.
EDIT: it really bothered me to use my personal phone number as well so I use an other number I had laying around
Well the phone number requirement is one of the best parts of signal IMO. Makes it much easier to find your contacts that are also using signal. Plus there's no account to create.
I just use both and its been fine for me.
Matrix and XMPP are the best services!
Please do not forget about Revolt the open source and self hostable, clone of Discord.
Shame is, Revolt refuses to support any kind of federation...
I don't know if Matrix is the solution for everything. There's xmpp, on the side of decentralized+federated options, which seems to me better in terms of meta data leaking, and for self hosting, less resource intensive. And on the side of distributed p2p mechanisms, there's Jami, Briar and others, which should be even better for privacy. The important thing is to make people realize centralized, and not so FOSS solutions (not sharing the actual code being at use, doesn't seem really open source, for example), plus having to trust the service provider, is not private neither secure...
Skip Signal, skip Matrix, go independent, go P2P.
Use Briar, the only messaging system that protects your metadata and does not need servers.
Does Briar work well? I have never tried it
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