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Is there any good private messenger at all? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by JustMarkov@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I've been inspecting this topic quite a lot and I'm a little confused now. So, we have reasons not to use Signal, reasons not to use Matrix, there were also some claims about Session being a fraught. Briar is mostly activists related (not very suitable for daily use), XMPP lacks good clients and suffers from fragmentation of protocol standards implementation, SimpleX is too feature-incomplete (no UnifiedPush support, big battery drain on Android, very decent desktop client without any message sync). I can't say a lot about Threema or Wire, as I'm not very familiar with them.

So, my question is — is there any good private messenger at all? What do you think is the most acceptable option?

EDIT: In addition to my post:

All messengers have their flaws, I'm well aware of that. I was interested in hearing users' opinions regarding these shortcomings, not in finding the perfect messenger. I may have worded my thoughts incorrectly, sorry for that.

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[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Matrix is decentralized, self-hostable, anonymous, and has good multi-device support, but hasn't yet moved certain meta-data into the encrypted channel.

yet? do they have plans? I'm (relatively) a fan of their platform because of federation, but I thought that it's not really possible, or at least a very much lot of hard work and even more to change that

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't remember the statement in the bug report verbatim, but it indicated that they intend to fix it, which is about what I had previously seen on other issues that they did subsequently fix. I expect it's mainly a matter of prioritizing a long to-do list.

I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible. The protocol is continually evolving, after all, and they already moved message content to an encrypted channel that didn't originally exist. Moving other events into it seems like a perfectly sensible next step in that direction.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible

I was in the impression that the protocol was designed with that in mind that the server can do certain things in response to certain other things happening. I think the room membership management part of the client spec writes about this.

But yeah, this can probably change, especially that they are now doing versioning

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

Worth mentioning just in case you're not aware: versioning is present not just on the protocol spec, but on individual rooms. That ought to ease any semantics changes that might be needed.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the hardest part is the DNS and federation

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't understand, could you reword it?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago

DNS requires public records and the federation meets sharing information between lots of servers.