Atariman

You basically started the whole thing by creating and supporting Maidan (like sooo many "revolutions" in the world), so please just shut up and take care your insane clown posse doesn't start WW3...

We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.

As a Swiss, I'm happy they finally try it. It's only around 5% of all government machines, but at least it's a start and I wish them all the best! We have to get independent asap from the US, they never were our (or any other countries) "friends" and most likely never will be. OSS ftw!

Yes, Bloom is really great and easily worth the price!

It could be so easy, just don't use anything related to Oracle. But it's the same as back in the days with IBM - nobody gets fired by buying stuff from Oracle.

Not every company is from an English speaking country, so spelling mistakes are happening.

You're welcome to send them an email to with the fixes instead of grumble here.

Signal is still US-based, so I'm not interested.

As a privacy concerned European, there's only one viable alternative: https://threema.ch/en/

It's open source and very secure: https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

Here is an interesting overview: https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

An awesome feature for me is this (from their FAQ): The dots are an indicator for a contact's verification level. They don't affect the encryption strength, but are a measure for the probability, that the saved public key of a contact belongs indeed to that contact.

Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from the server because you received a message from this contact for the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim to be in their messages.

Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server verifies phone numbers and email addresses, you can be reasonably sure that the person is who they claim to be.

Level 2 (blue): This verification level is only available in Threema Work; it indicates that the Threema ID belongs to an internal company contact.

Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that messages from this contact were really written by the person that they indicate.

Level 3 (blue): This verification level is only available in Threema Work; it indicates that the Threema ID belongs to an internal contact whose ID and public key you have verified by scanning their QR code.

You're right, the UI maybe could have been a bit more intuitive. However, the setup is far from rocket science and could easily be improved by the developers.

And yeah, it may only have 1% of users but thats's only because 95% have WA... It's a choice about freedom and you have to start somewhere. I converted more than 50% of my contacts to Threema - the rest has expensive phones but obviously no money to protect their privacy.

I would recommend Threema. It's been recently open-sourced and has the most secure encryption mechanism.

https://threema.ch/en/open-source