So, I was told to not use Signal, so all that is left is Matrix. And I am not techy enough to have my own server and neither are my relatives, so Matrix.org is the only option
Yeah, sure. But Matrix is decentralized and federated. So you can pretty much join any instance and be able to talk with anyone on any instance. So why not select another instance or maybe even self host one yourself?
edit: didn’t read the text till the end
simplex is good as an alternative
SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:
- It is funded by venture capital, which calls into question its longevity, and even if it does manage to stick around, suggests that it will be leveraged to exploit people once the user base is large enough.
- Its queue servers delete messages if they are not delivered within a certain time frame (21 days by default). Good luck if you take a vacation off-grid for a few weeks.
- No multi-device support. (This means a single account accessed concurrently from multiple independent devices.) The closest it comes is locally tethering a mobile device to a computer.
- Establishing new contacts requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is not always convenient.
- No support for group calls.
I would not recommend it for talking to family members and people in general, which is what OP requested.
Why would Matrix be the only option? XMPP is significantly better. You can either sign up on a public server or pay a small sum to have your own private server for you and your family for example on https://snikket.org/ or I think https://jmp.chat/ also includes optionally a small server in the subscription.
I’ve always been curious with the differences between XMPP and matrix but i can’t ever find anything explaining it. Why is it in your opinion better?
I know I am just a normie who doesn’t really know internal workings of them… But in my experience, XMPP is just easier to host, the servers are lighter, they don’t store everything they touch forever like Matrix does, and OMEMO doesn’t break like Matrix’s encryption. Synapse would be probably impossible to run on my VPS, while Conduit and Dendrite are not as full-featured.
OMEMO is a mixed bag. Some clients are still preferring older versions that aren’t the best for security & almost every client does a bad job explaining that new keys are being used need to be verified… Gajim only recently gave a decent in-client pop-up for it, but it’s doesn’t work all the time. That said, this is basically the same issue Matrix has in the space. Both are based on libsignal if not outright using it, except Signal gets a point of privilege in basically having just one client …one that must be on Android/iOS according to their statements… so they can do a ‘better’ job managing who, what, & how many keys are being used. Many XMPP clients will recommend blind trust by default just because it can be a real hassle to deal with multiple clients & users coming back to less-often-used devices. There have been proposals to fix it, but I haven’t seen anything really take off (meanwhile considering just using the PGP encryption option as less flaky).
Basically Matrix is to Xmpp, what Bluesky is to ActivityPub. Which all the various issues both technically and related to VC and crypto-currency funding.
In addition Matrix uses a federation model that is extremely inefficient, making it hard to run your own server once you have a few users that join larger rooms. And as a side effect of this inefficient federation model that replicates the database onto all participating servers, it tends to centralize all the metadata on the servers (run on AWS under UK jurisdiction) hosted by the for-profit company that is behind Matrix.
And last but not least they rugpulled everyone very recently and made the only fully functional server implementation open-core to upsell larger servers to their proprietary hosted offering.
Interesting, and I didn’t know matrix itself into that much short (though they always had a lifeless corpo feeling…)
I’ve always wanted to create an account but never was able to figure out how (for my chosen servers at least) but know i want to try again. thanks for the info :)
Why is it in your opinion better?
It’s an open protocol, unlike 99% of chat protocols. It’s self-hostable and federated.
It’s IRC’s successor and been around a long time, first popularized by Jabber. Snikket made it even easier to use.
It was also EEEed by Meta and Google to lure users at a given point, with leads some to say “it’s dead” — far from it.
Edit: you may need to ensure OMEO versions are the same across all clients.
Right, but how does that make it better than matrix? it is also an open protocol, and most spaces that i use are on matrix anyway.
attempted to be EEEed is a good sign i guess, since it implies it’s a threat to meta and google though.
Signal is perfectly fine to use.
Most packages/installs of Signal contain proprietary code. I suggest Molly-FOSS instead.
Molly also has some quality-of-life improvements - such as allowing to enter a device pairing link manually instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing use in a VM for registration without a smartphone), or being able to use a generic Socks proxy instead of Signal’s own solution. Not only does that allow running Signal over Tor without using Orbot as a “VPN”, but is also more versatile (I wouldn’t want to set up a separate proxy just for Signal, and also their implementation is apparently inferior to some advanced obfuscation solutions).
P.S. Also idk if this has been fixed, but Signal’s app bugged out during registration and got stuck on “no google services” warning on my Graphene device, yet Molly went through flawlessly.
I think there is campaign to get people to use signal, while servers are proprietary and other things are questionable.
It is a great operation for convincing the majority.
Servers are always going to be owned by someone. But the data is encrypted with keys not available to the server. Signal isn’t perfect, and I don’t like some stuff they do, but it’s the best design out there that is also relatively user friendly and doesn’t have holes that are easy to exploit by the server owner.
It is not. We are on a privacy sub on lemmy, services that require mandatory phone number are far away from been fine to use.
Can you please provide any data where Signal has been compromised? I’m not saying that the possibility doesn’t exist, but I’ve certainly never seen one single instance where Signal was compromised, so please do share.
Probably yes, it depends on your threat model.
If you are using E2EE on a matrix.org account then your message content, attachments (images) and most other traffic isn’t accessible to anyone but the people in the chat. However Matrix isn’t the most private option, it has a number of leaks such as reactions and chat topics (these are being worked on but aren’t close to happening).
For most people Matrix is a very private and secure option and the fact that it is federated is a huge plus. If you want something more secure you are probably looking at Signal (which you don’t want to use and isn’t federated) or Simplex Chat (which doesn’t have multi-device support).
Unfortunately even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you or take over your channel.
Of course you could run your own instance, or maybe none of this is part of your threat model, but I felt like bringing it up either way.
even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you
No, they cannot. Your homeserver admin could create an impostor login session on your account, but it would be pointless with E2EE, because it would be flagged with an obviously visible warning. You and all of your contacts would see that the impostor session was not verified as you (this typically shows up as a bright red icon on the impostor and another one on the room they’re in). Also, the impostor would be unable to read your communications.
What do you have to say about this then?
In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations.
Perhaps we have a different definition of “impersonate”… not everyone will pay attention to unverified warnings, and afaik they can still communicate with people (just maybe not read old messages)… but I would love to be proven wrong.
That isn’t what that document says. It says that they can impersonate you in non-E2EE scenarios. The clients I use warn me when a message isn’t properly encrypted so someone without E2EE keys can’t impersonate someone in an E2EE room.
That being said the general concept is a problem. I would love to see progress where all events from a user are signed by a device key and non-forgable. There is some thinking about this with portable identities (such as MSC2787) where you server is basically just storing and forwarding events but the root of trust is your identity and keys that you control. But none of this will land soon, not for many years.
