I’ve been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.
I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It’s all open source too on GitHub.
Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.
Not sure, but I couldn’t find Tox (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)) anywhere?
I’ll ask here since it’s such a good thread: best FLOSS privacy respecting replacement for discord?
Adding to sibling… Discord is used in a couple of different ways at present for communities. If you mean voice coms for gaming or otherwise, Mumble should be in your repository. If it’s more of a of a Slack-like business chat, self-hosted Mattermost is actually pretty nice. If it’s just text chat, IRCv3 & XMPP have that covered & scale massively even on a home PC. If it’s voice calls, Jitsi or Jami can work. If you are posting updates or things that should be forum topics, you shouldn’t be using chat anyways where Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, & other Fediverse options or even Atom feeds can suffice. If you want integrated chat, community updates/posts, voice/video calls (unsure if conference calls are support) Movim is a good option–and if you don’t mind the rough UI edges, Libervia can do similar but also integrates a calendar for events. Bear in mind as well that a lot of these technologies can be bridged between one another to avoid some of the lock-in, but I would hesitate to force everyone’s chat to be piped & logged thru Discord’s servers. It’s also not bad to say “we use these 2 services” rather than requiring a kitchen sink communications application.
Very thorough response thanks. This shows me about how many things discord covers, which is a good and bad thing, makes migrating away much more difficult.
Define covers… With something like Mumble for instance, you can host a server (real server, not Discord ’servers“), have low-latency real-time chat with noise cancelation algorithms, directional audio, etc. & it comes with a chat you can use, it’s just not very robust. But there’s also a decent chance your group or whatever isn’t using all of the features & could be happy with IRCv3 & XMPP since you can share text, image, videos. My biggest gripe tho is that some communities use it as a replacement for forums or Atom like you were supposed to read & follow every thread because they want to shoehorn Discord as the one-size-fits-all tool. The other issue is not treating that sort of chat as ephemeral–opting to assume users want or need the entire history (which reminds me that I should do a better job with my bookmarks & note taking than relying on search); but also while the history is ‘permanent’ it’s not publicly accessible in the cases where community decisions should be seen (such as making roadmap for an open source programming language) where those not present for the conversation may have missed it, have trouble referring to it, & the search engines can’t find it since it was locked behind Discord’s walled garden.
In a lot of communities historically & still operate in a manner where important discussions & long-lived threads live on the forums, and real-time chat is treated as social or one-off questions/tips. Operating your community with two different tools here is okay… even a third for say video conferencing if it’s not something you do often, especially if it means one or more cogs in that wheel of communication can be non-proprietary.
Additionally I missed adding mailing lists as an option as well as Zulip for forums/chat.
This is worthy of a more usable interface than this spreadsheet widget.
It took me a fair bit of scrolling to identify which attributes each of the six purple “N/A” values for SimpleX are, but now that I have I agree they’re accurate (though I think there is an argument to be made for just writing a green “no” for each of them).
It is noteworthy that SimpleX is currently the only one of these (currently 34) messengers to not have a single red or yellow cell in its column. well done, @epoberezkin@lemmy.ml! 😀
edit: istm that SimpleX (along with several other things) getting a “no” in the “can hand IP address to the police” row is not really accurate. SimpleX does better than many things here in that they don’t have a lot of other info to give to the police along with the IP, but, if Bob has their phone seized (or remotely compromised) and then the police reading Alice and Bob’s messages from Bob’s phone want to know Alice’s IP address… they can compel a server operator to give it to them. (And it is the same for a user who posts a SimpleX contact link publicly.)
Briar has even fewer N/As than SimpleX and all greens otherwise. Second column in the table.
Briar has even fewer N/As than SimpleX and all greens otherwise. Second column in the table.
Briar has a yellow Yes in row 12 ('requires global identity')
… presumably because (if you have one instance of the Briar installed) when you’re talking to two different people they can check and confirm you’re the same person, while in SimpleX you can create disposable/ephemeral identities for different chats.
I haven’t reviewed this thoroughly but I can see that there are a lot of attributes that could be added to this table in regards to metadata protection against various parties, including revealing online presence to servers and contacts (which is a place where briar falls short).
It would be great 8f you could make a simpler table that’s easier to parse, just to get a quick overview of how each platform stacks up
