I am really fed up with WhatsApp (closed source, jurisdiction that may impose backdoors soon)

I would even try to convince friends and family to move to something else but to what?

Signal so far has been the obvious choice but the fear that they may impose backdoors becomes more and more concrete.

Threema seems great! But they want 3€ and there is no chance in hell that my friends and family would pay it.

I saw a bunch of options on https://european-alternatives.eu/category/instant-messaging-apps but I would like to gather experiences and opinions

    • adry@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      I second this! FYI, XMPP is the one protocol that as been forked over and over… it’s the base of all (or many) messaging apps (incl. whatsapp). The thing is that XMPP has all this “Extensions” to their protocol, and it’s difficult to implement or have a federated protocol that goes like that, with so many variations… that are implemented or installed on servers, and then also used by clients (e.g. Conversations is a great app on mobile, but not ready for just an average joe or my grandma)… I reckon snikket doesn’t implement OTR (the end-to-end encryption of XMPP), that could be a downside to some. But, please, reconsider if you really need that… if you happen to self-host, and then use SSL to encrypt on transit, and storage is encrypted on the server… that’s already pretty much everything we need/ want in most cases (e.g. communicating with family safely.)

      The only contender would be hosting an email server (which is tough, dependes on your luck with getting a ‘clean’ IPv4) on a cheap VPS (say €5 per month, for all users) and then install Delta Chat.