Hi everyone, I am looking for an encrypted messaging service to start using and recommending to my friends and family, I really want to get this right the first time. At the moment I’m looking at using matrix I really like it’s bridges and federated nature, Although I’m not 100% sure about it’s ux.
What I want to ask is what messaging service do you use and do you have any regrets with it? What encrypted messaging service would you recommended?
Edit: I just had another question are any of the bridges in matrix end to end encrypted? If person A used matrix and person B used signal could person A use a bridge to talk to person B securely?
for me it’s xmpp. now that monal on ios has almost reached feature parity with conversations on android, there’s no reason xmpp shouldn’t be the go-to alternative to whatsapp.
I don’t think signal is the answer. a centralised service susceptible to all the things wrong with whatsapp. matrix is bloated. push notifications on simplex android is still sketchy.
and i dont buy the argument that onboarding is too complicated these days. most people can make an account for anything they feel is worth it.
Recommending to friends and family means Signal. With a phone number they can start using the gold standard for encryption from the get go.
I just moved to Signal and have convinced most of my family and many friends to join. It is very secure, non-profit and doesn’t share much personal data (the least of the main messaging services) and most of my luddite family has been able to figure it out.
signal or SimpleX.
I’m starting to move away from Matrix, primarily because its metadata is not encrypted. So you might have a message that’s encrypted, but the emoji reaction like a thumbs up is not encrypted, and the time it was sent and received is not encrypted, and who it was sent from and to is not encrypted.
Not to mention that in Matrix, private key management for encryption in rooms and stuff like that is quite frankly a pain in the ass. Even I as a cryptocurrency user have trouble making sure that my keys are properly stored without fucking them up.
I would not recommend my friends or family members use it for these reasons.
Signal
Matrix, xmpp, simplex. Do not use Signal or any service with centralized servers hosted in a 5 eyes country.
Seconding simplex. Having a built in way to obfuscate IP is very nice. But its more for privacy extremism and small group chats for people in vulnerable situations, matrix is best for most situations e.g. community and interest groups. I also had some ease with setting up simplex with my grandma, funny enough. Not needing to make an account made it much easier for her.
Hope Lemmy gets a simplexchat field one day!
Signal for your family (mostly due to interface), Matrix for online communities, and SimplexChat if you’re trying to be a privacy extremist. I did have some success with setting simplexchat up for some old people over the phone because they didn’t need an account.
Signal. It’s changed a lot. For the better.
Contains proprietary code. I recommend Molly-FOSS instead.
Upvoted.
Appreciate the reply, but I don’t mind some proprietary code. There are very few reviews of open code by respected bodies (I’m writing in generality here). I’m certainly not qualified to review code. Just being open is only the beginning of the journey.
As we’ve seen with some open software recently there are some active hackers successfully targeting open software because it is open. Such exploits are not always discovered in good time.
https://thenewstack.io/why-so-much-open-source-software-is-vulnerable-to-hackers/
https://thehackernews.com/2025/01/github-desktop-vulnerability-risks.html
Etc etc.
I place store by the warrant responses and action of government entities against some software.
Thanks. You’re not wrong, and I appreciate the well-written response. Some might say you are defending/advocating proprietary software with this stance, but I don’t think there is a clear answer either way that applies to every circumstance.
Thank-you for your kindness. And it is really kind!
I’m old so my view of prop software is rooted in the change of early Microsoft et al bringing real change to the dubious parasitic entities that they are today. I watched it slowly happen and have been delighted and contributing in a small way with Linux since the turn of the century.
RedHat had been sold to the ‘no-one ever got fired for buying IBM’ (I still can’t believe that they believed that that was a winning slogan). In these trying times the love for open source isn’t translating into enough cash; average people are stretched.
I can’t wait for the leaders in my country to stop pandering to the world’s oligarchs and serve the people that elected them.
Signal for security standard and ease of use, which is essential, if You want to use it with non techy people.
Simplex for anonymity, You can download it, share chat and start talking without registration.
Simplex for anonymity, You can download it, share chat and start talking without registration.
It ate my battery when I installed it. Do you use it on a daily basis? What’s your experience with its battery consumption?
Have it on always on, with small scale friends and family use. Don’t find it too draining, updates have improved the battery usage
I’m in one room with 1,500 people and it uses about 7% of my battery. Mind you, that is a lot for a messenger. But I can deal with that.
Sadly, I have no one to use with it, so I don’t know about battery usage. I just like, that it doesn’t require any external identifiers, unlike Signal.
Just a note that there’s an in development fediverse app called ‘sup’ by the creators of pixelfed. It’s not released yet but is going to be encrypted and Open Source. https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113912441928236882
No bridges are not end 2 end encrypted. The best you can do is host the server and bridge in your own home and thus have the bridge “end” in a secure location.
If your friends and family are not very technical, then Matrix is probably a bad idea as it tends to be quite in your face about all sorts of technical issues especially with the encryption keys and so on. It works ok usually once everything is set up though.
XMPP is IMHO the better option as the mobile apps are easier to understand and the e2ee usually works out of the box and stays out of the way unless you specifically want to mess around with it. For a friends & family server I recommend setting up https://snikket.org/ or rent a server from them cheaply.
There are also good bridges for XMPP, but setting them up requires more understanding of self-hosting.
I second xmpp + omemo, and would caution that as far as I can remember matrix leaks significant metadata when syncing between instances/services.
As a personal decision I got away from signal (molly in fact) more than a year ago.
I’m also keep jami working with my family, particularly for things not requiring immediate response. It’s a different beast, since it’s p2p, but there’s no server associated to it, no matter if decentralized or not. It’s easy as well, just not as responsive, in particular if looking for immediate responses… I like and keep both, hoping jami improves.
Yup echoing most here. Unless you or someone you are paying are willing to put time and effort in to maintaining Matrix, go with Signal. It’s like WhatsApp but actually secure and is appropriate for the vast majority of use cases.
Personally I’d go with Signal. Matrix has a certain jank level IME, for example rooms can get desynced between homeservers and the only way to fix is to create a new room and abandon the old one. Not sure how often that happens for small scale use though, I’ve only seen it in large rooms.
I will second the others that only suggest Signal or a variant of Signal like Langis or Molly. Everybody has each other’s phone numbers, go with Signal so people don’t need any other contact information.
Never heard of Langis before :)
Signal is the easiest with true end to end encryption with keys stored on the endpoints only.
