I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.
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What I like about Matrix so much is that it can be run fully on your own infrastructure, even the TURN server for VOIP, and you can build the clients from source yourself too.
But I agree that it’s quite difficult to use. And until now only my dad and my spouse use it with me because they love me and trust me. But they both always have problems with their clients. It randomly logs out and then they have to login with the password and with the encryption key again. For a long time calling didn’t work because I misconfigured the server. Then videos were for the longest time uploaded in full size and anything longer than a few seconds would be rejected. The whole spaces thing is implemented very weirdly so it confuses them. And then the threads are even worse so we can’t use them because nobody gets how to do it.
Signal ux is much better fyi, though I accept it’s hard to roll your own. Trade offs are generally worth
As far as I know you can’t host your own signal server which connects to their servers.
I’m using Signal with the rest of the family and most friends.
SimpleX is currently my favourite. Yeah, there are some small concerns, but where aren’t they? I hope SimpleX can grow more popular and I’m also waiting for a full-featured desktop client, so it’ll be easier to convince people to switch.
TLDR: Avoid Telegram and WhatsApp. Recommended messengers are Session, Signal, SimpleX and Threema. Honorable mention: Briar.
Honorable mention to Matrix as well
Session should probably be avoided as well, primarily because they’ve disabled things like perfect forward secrecy and a few other security measures that probably should not have been disabled.
Session is dead lmfao
As always, the problem isnt using a new service or super secure app, the problem is making everyone else I talk to use said app, not happening anytime soon sadly.
Another basic thing – If your messenger is throwing your messages in a notification; it’s being logged. Google was found to be logging almost all notification content. Make sure your message app isn’t putting the content of messages into notifications.
As a long time user of Session, it is hard to believe someone would describe it as “user-friendly”.
Matrix doesn’t offer disappearing messages (which I consider important for digital minimalism and cybersecurity.
I noticed this in the article and figured I’d throw my 2 cents in. This might be a spicy take, but I actually can’t stand apps that do this.
When I was in school I had someone harass me online with threats of violence (they spent a couple of hours insulting and threatening me) then lie to the staff that I was harassing them with even more extreme shit. The staff and other students all took their side until I logged in and showed the conversation. If the messages had disappeared I wouldn’t have been able to prove my innocence.
I very firmly want encrypted communications for privacy (I use Signal and Matrix), but I am quite wary of purging communications automatically. That said, it’s anyone’s right to use services that auto delete and my right not to.
I’m curious what other people’s take on this would be.
Couldn’t you have blocked them?
I fail to see how that would’ve helped in that situation, it had extended to real life.
I like Signal, but I really miss multi device support. Same issue with Threema.
