I use wire (wire. com) for daily chatting. I like it but I couldn’t find any good communities in wire. In session, or simpleX, there are privacy (and other) groups in which anyone can participate… Can we start a privacy group in wire so we folks can also hang around?
I wouldn’t invest time in Wire.
I got my entire family to use it seven or eight years ago. Since then, Wire has continually made changes that have only made the system worse for free users. I assume they’re doing it to push people to the paid subscriptions, but it could also simply be developer incompetence. Either way, there isn’t a good alternative for a non-techie group of people, amd switching costs are high, so we’re stuck on it as it slowly degrades.
Notifications have become consistently more flakey over time, and none of our Android users can “Share” media with the app anymore (it doesn’t show up as an option). Wire used to have an animated GIF lookup option built-in - sort of like fancy emojis - which disappeared earlier this year. Group video calls were disabled for the free tier last year. It’s a slow enshitification, and I’d recommend not investing time onboarding a bunch of people.
there isn’t a good alternative for a non-techie group of people
I find Signal to be very user friendly, what don’t you like about it?
Metadata. Requiring a phone number to register. And a hostile anti-federation, anti-API stance by Signal. Sure, you can run your own server, but you can’t connect to anyone in the official Signal network, and third-party apps are also disallowed.
Wire has the same problem, don’t get me wrong. They’ve been resolutely refusing any third-party connections (mainly requests from Matrix bridge folks). But Signal isn’t an improvement on these fonts.
Signal is building straight alternative to WhatsApp. And it is very good because everyone who uses it can easily switch to Signal, without complications. Federation adds many new concepts (problems) for normal human, more latency and makes development way slower which is also very bad for mass adoption. And they are against only of 3rd party clients which use Signal in name. Molly exists, f.e. So Signal rocks 🤟😄
Well, you said it yourself, Wire isn’t much different in that regard, so Signal is pretty much a one for one substitute.
I would like federation for Signal too somehow, in fact I use Matrix on the side, in particular with people I don’t want to share my phone number with, but that doesn’t prevent it from being a very solid option in and of itselfSignal minimizes metadata, they don’t store it and encrypts everything, phone number isn’t a issue as long you don’t need anonimity, not everyone have to like federation and there are a lot of third party Signal clients which works perfect and they are allowed, like Molly.
Any alternatives?
Update 2023-09-28
Edits include addl feature discussion, but mainly an update on Session.
Nope. Maybe?
- Session looks very promising, and I’m trying it right now with my wife. She’s much better at catching software warts - if she starts using it more than the N other ways (she currently has Jami, Element, SMS, and now Session on her phone), then I’ll know it’s a hit. It is lacking a critical feature for phone use: editing previous messages, and it’d be nice if it had Jami’s location-sharing. Security and anonymity looks good.
- Matrix is promising, but encryption is still extremely brittle, and prevents me from inviting non-technical F&F.
- SimpleX is promising, but without multi-device support, it’s a non-starter.
- Jami is promising, but I can’t get the client to work on Arch (it just segfaults), and the answer to my ticket was “Arch isn’t supported.” In my case, it’s because my Qt was newer than their required version - it compiled, but just segfaulted. I lost interest at that point. Notifications are unreliable, as is message delivery. It fails the wife test. It does have a great realtime location sharing feature, which is super handy for, e.g., picking people up at the airport, but that’s not enough of a killer feature top overcome the reliability issues.
- Tox - Shoot. I try Tox every once in a while. I know that I uninstalled it once because the mobile app sucked my battery down, but I don’t remember if it has some fundamental flaw. I think it doesn’t support multi-device? I’ll have to check it again.
- Lichat looked interesting, but Ocelot hasn’t been updated since '21; it’s a small project with not a lot of documentation beyond the spec
~I may have looked at Session at one point, but don’t remember why I put it in the No category. I’ll have to review it again.~ See my update at top. Session is currently a contender.
XMPP may be the elephant in the room. I used XMPP for years, back before Google supported it, and after. I know a lot of people advocate it, and I think it’s a reasonable option; it’s certainly well-established. It leaks a lot of metadata, but then, it wasn’t designed with security in mind - all of the security has been bolted on after the fact, frankenstein mode. So has multi-participant chat. In fact, most features have been tacked on, and I guess that’s why I avoid it these days. Nothing seems well-integrated and reliably functioning. But YMMV; it may be the best option at the moment.
It leaks a lot of metadata
That is largely a myth. Sure metadata protection could be better in XMPP, but it is not worse than in most other chat systems, and certainly much better than in Matrix for example.
XMPP
No centralized services, please. I’d vote for either XMPP or SimpleX. IRC will also work for me.
if you create a MUC in XMPP, I’m in
Haven’t heard of wire. Is the name a Lain reference, perhaps?
What does everyone think of session, from what I can tell its promising.
Too many bugs
Yes please. Wire is definitely the best messenger currently avsilable, considering everything.
Whats with matrix?
It’s possible to disable encryption in Matrix. Some matrix clients dont even support encryption.
E2E Encryption is always on in Wire, no exceptions
And its centralized andnogt self hostable :D
Wire is self hostable. Both client and server are open source.
avoid matrix https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-matrix.org/-/tree/master/part1
XMPP it is.
Have you checked the XMPP default settings? Its not even e2ee
what are you talking about? XMPP doesn’t have such a thing as default settings. It varies from client to client. There are clients which have E2EE enabled by default, clients which make it available, others that support it with a plugin and there are others that do not support E2EE.
That’s no excuse to avoid XMPP. XMPP is an open standard, the key is choosing a good implementation.
Well the article you linked stated that as bad thing for matrix… Have you read the article? Just think about it the same way but with XMPP
