>> I was involved in a paid audit of Wire so I know more about the encryption protocol than I do about the other clients

Seeing as you mentioned Threema in the same post, I think I ought to step in here.

The encryption protocol for Threema is open source, using standard algorithms, not something they invented.

You, like I did for $my_org, can write your own software to send messages to devices running Threema using the Threema API.

Message contents are, of course, encrypted before submission to the API. Threema provide a number of SDKs to help you, but you are under no obligation to use it, you can write your own API submission client from scratch.

P.S. Not saying Wire is bad here. Wire is good. I use it alongside Threema myself for $other_uses. But I'm saying don't write off Threema under a false understanding that their encryption protocols are closed source.

That's a good point. Threema using standard libsodium cryptoboxes makes this easier to reimplement than these Axolotl-like protocols. Still, Wire has a bot API so you don't need to reinvent the wheel to integrate in a chat. Not sure that's any harder than using libsodium.

Afaik Signal doesn't have an API or SDK, there only seem to be third party implementations for bots.

Signal will by design likely be more stable than Matrix in the short term because it is a centralized dictatorship.

China can move fast for this reason too.

You have to decide if the long term consequences of a fast moving dictatorship are worth giving up the freedom of a sometimes messy democracy.

The internet is too important to herd all our services into control of dictators, no matter how benevolent.

We survived the dialup days for all the UX hell of many providers without giving AOL exclusive control in spite of them having the best UX.

I hope we can do the same with something as critically important as worldwide internet communications, but the marketing of dictators and their ability to move quickly is sometimes too hard to resist until it all backfires spectacularly.

That's what they want you to believe for some reason. Moxie went so far as to talk in the biggest hall at the last chaos communication congress about how important it is that we don't use decentralized services and clients.

I'm not buying it. Look at Matrix and tell me it's holding them back.

What's holding them back, perhaps, is not having a shitton of money in the bank like Signal, and they're actively supportive of decentralization which costs developer resources. Signal (or Matrix, for that matter) could not spend dev time on decentralization and just let the open source community do its thing. But that's not what Signal is doing, they're instead actively hostile towards it.

Or look at Telegram, they have an open network and third party clients. There also are unofficial clients that some people use. But what does the 99% use? The official clients. Signal's argument is that people might use insecure, unofficial clients. In practice, that's not what your average mom will do. (And it's not as if the official Signal app was audited either.)

I'm also not buying the "China can move faster" thing. They can be more oppressive without consequences, but is that really better? Does that "centralized dictatorship" allow them to be "more stable"? It's easy to say, and easy to see how indeed an oppressive government's decree can change things from one day to the next, but on that scale I think you need to consider more things than I am qualified to do before you can really say whether that is a superior system in a given situation.

I guess we conclude the same thing in the end, though, as you say "The internet is too important to herd all our services into control of dictators, no matter how benevolent."

> I'm not buying it. Look at Matrix and tell me it's holding them back.

The main argument against federated protocols playing well with security is that they have a harder time evolving. The example always given is email. Once Matrix has reached 500M users and several server implementations with less than 20% market share each, how can you be sure that it will keep improving contrary to email protocols? WhatsApp switched to E2EE in a matter of months, but most of our emails are still plaintext on the servers.

I like and use Matrix as a replacement for IRC, but I don't think they will catch up in terms of security with Signal in most practical situations (meaning, I want to send a message to a non-technical person). Both because of the fossilization associated with federated protocol (see above), and simply because developing a federated protocol is way harder and less forgiving than a centralized one.

Your argument about the "99% use" means that first that you don't need centralization if it's already centralized in practice, and second that it brings very little benefit (benefits only 1% of users). At that point, the (possibly low) costs of decentralization are not worth it.

Signal did not have a shit ton of money until a year or two ago. I like Matrix but it's main issue is still UI/UX on clients (especially around key management) - which is slowly getting better but still too complex for normal non-techie users.

> Wire is the better choice if you can sacrifice a tiny bit of usability for better privacy.

Do you mean better privacy than Signal? I was under the impression that Signal was significantly ahead of Wire in this regard with features like private groups and private contact discovery.

Private contact discovery and other metadata protection claims are largely security theatre. SGX is entirely broken and those with physical (and sometimes even remote) access can dump keys at any time.

They pinky swear they always patch and never dump keys when they have the chance though.

It's a security theater not only because someone broke it, but also because you can always just look at which IPs talk to which IPs. Even Tor has issues with preventing traffic analysis, except with Signal you can observe (or trust) a single party (instead of the guard and exit nodes) to get the data.

It's more of a trust thing than something you can technically solve while still having features like real-time calling. Hence Facebook being objectionable despite having encryption.

They're both hosted on USA-based services, they both have proper encryption on the client and apply it also to calls and video calls. There is no significant difference to me in terms of privacy.

Usability is slightly different, yes, and you might also trust Signal more because they do better PR (they say outright that they're from the USA and get money from Facebook, while Wire has devs in Berlin and claims to be a German company, while taking money from USA investors... which imo comes down to the same thing), or you might trust Wire more because they were actually audited at all.

For a family that are all on the same server, Nextcloud Talk is also nice and "relatively easy" to set up (and 0 effort when you already use Nextcloud). I am still desperately waiting on Talk being able to use the federation features of Nextcloud (so you can chat to users on other servers). That would increase my usage a lot, my parents are on another server (which admittedly also runs from my basement) and I have colleagues with their own server...

I do use Signal and Telegram with some friends, I really find the difference between WA and Signal to be small. Telegram though is a lot nicer as a platform, it has some channels I'm part of and the desktop client is much better. But this comes with privacy/security trade-offs as mentioned in this thread.

I also use Element.io for some channels and groups. I find it surprisingly nice. I may set up a server myself soon.

As someone who doesn't use WhatsApp, thanks for mentioning WA and Signal are not very different and that Telegram has better UX. That matches what I thought, but I didn't know and I was a bit worried what I'd be signing my family up for when asking them to switch away from Telegram.

Yeah, Signal used to handle changing phones pretty poorly but that is sort of solved now (you can store your groups and phonebook in the cloud behind a pin). Other than that it is really nice. The desktop client is arguably better than WA's web solution, although I have run into non-syncing messages, but, you can use the desktop client with your phone off, which is a major + imho.

Honestly, Signal is just super high quality when you take into account how privacy focused it is, I could easily replace WA with Signal, apart from "the network effect".

> you can use the desktop client with your phone off, which is a major + imho

Indeed, if it has to go through my phone it's nigh unusable in my opinion. Wire and Element/Matrix handle this properly since they don't depend on a phone number in the first place (so no need to tie it to your phone), only Signal and Threema are somewhat of a pain in this regard since you need to link it, and only Threema absolutely requires your phone to be online all the time.

I can recommend the FluffyChat Matrix client, it's quite pleasant to use, although still not perfect :)

https://fluffychat.im/

Why is Telegram not on your list?

They lie about encryption. They call themselves an encrypted messenger when they're not, at least not in the way that people expect nowadays. I volunteered for their support team a few years ago but was rejected because the first test question was about their encryption and I refused to lie (I said regular chats are encrypted but only to the server, i.e. that Telegram can read your messages which was true then and is still true today, and that you need to use secret chats for encryption.)

I ended up adding a paragraph about it anyhow but that's why, when starting to write the post, I didn't add Telegram to the list. There is also rocket.chat further down that I didn't mention on top, fwiw.

it is?

I should maybe have put it in the list on top. I initially listed only the encrypted messengers, but later decided to add a paragraph about Telegram anyway.