this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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The difficulty of any non-mainstream chat app is getting other people to use it. On that list, Signal is the most probable to be recognized by people who don't have a particular interest in privacy, so it's more likely to get more people to use it.
besides that, and besides the lack of forward secrecy on matrix and session already mentioned by privacy guides, do some of these alternatives have worse security, privacy, or ux than signal in some way?
both have worse UX than Signal. pretty much all except Signal are lacking on this front. OSS developers are allergic to a smooth UX in general
This is the complete and sad truth 🤣
Signal's UX is NOT good unless you want to expose your encrypted conversations to a smartphone (of which far from all can run a private OS). All because of no desktop registration. You either have to use inconvenient signal-cli, or an Android emulator which creates its own troubles.
xmpp has a variety of clients for desktop and mobile. You cannot dismiss them all as having worse ux than signal.
The same is true for matrix.
Dunno, it's fine for me. As a messenging app it moslty gets out of my way and lets me communicate. It has all of the important functionality and creature comforts. Also, it already has some bloat (stories, whatever that crypto payment thing was/is). And the UI / UX is perfectly fine as is.
Although, as a dev myself, I hate UX work, it's just boring and unfulfilling. I get why UX is often an afterthought. First it has to be functional, anything beyond that is secondary.
Signals UX is no better than SMS apps. People I've tried to convert all say the same thing.
~~But it's still the most secure/privacy minded messenger. ~~
Signal has read receipts, reactions and typing indicators. That's 90% of what any messenger needs. It also let's you schedule texts. I do wish it would do reminders and pinch to resize text though.
false
Matrix also does have a pretty big problem with meta data. By default it stores a ton of meta data (at least the reference server implementation does) and I am not sure if this is even a solvable problem without redesigning the protocol. When opting for an alternative to Signal, XMPP is probably the better choice.
and how are they ordered in popularity?
That's a good question. I wonder if there are available user numbers for them.
I imagine it's regional and depends on what communities you are in. SimpleX chat seems pretty popular these days in privacy circles but I could see something like Briar being useful if traditional networks weren't reliably available for example.