Hello, I’m doing some research for my family and friends to help them navigate the tech space and recommend them some better privacy focused alternatives. I’ve been stuck with the most important piece: instant messaging.
Ideally I would like something:
- decentralised
- Foss
- Possibly not tied to phone number
- Encrypted
- Not funded by an US or Israeli company
- Fairly easy to use by not tech people
If I manage to convince them, I can’t make them change in a year or so, the alternative needs to be future-proof.
- Signal: is Foss (not completely) but not decentralised (one “wrong” update and we are back to square one) + very much american funded
- Matrix: foss and decentralised but funded by an Israeli company (sorry I really can’t)
- Telegram: phone number registration, not fully encrypted, server proprietary
- Theema: server side not open source
- IRC: no video/audio calls, not encrypted
That leaves me with SimpleX and XMPP, I think (I don’t know much about them). What do you guys use/recommend?
I’m reading [this wiki page].(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_protocols?wprov=sfti1#Table_of_instant_messaging_protocols)
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned Session yet. Open source, not based on phone numbers, decentralised (uses Tor), based in Switzerland, otherwise it’s a lot like Signal. Exactly what you’re after, really
I didn’t understand the cryptocurrency part… is the application doing some mining on the phone??
It doesn’t run on the OG Tor network itself as I understand it - people run their own specific Session Nodes that act as the “tor-like” backbone.
The crypto part is because to set up your own node, you proof of stake a bunch of their coin, and if your node is found to be unreliable or blatantly malicious your stake is locked (or even forefitted? Not sure about that part)