A genuine discussion about the best FLOSS decentralized system to share poop emojis and videocall your dog.
I would use simplex if there was a desktop client. I like Signal because I can use it across all my devices.
It runs well enough in Windows Subsystem for Android!
Signal is wannabe private because of phone number, metadata and contacts mining (even though they say they don’t, they can). Simplex looks promising and the guy is headed in the right direction. As soon as he makes it that the servers cannot correlate which IP is talking to which IP, I will say they are a really good solution. Telling people to use Tor with your app for privacy is not a solution.
Besides that, it is a very well made app that has a nice UI and works very well. Also many good features.
Another super cool thing about it is that it’s written entirely in Haskell!
I did a bit of research for my personal use and what came out as the best options in 2023 are indeed SimpleX and Briar. What do you think of the latter?
The last time I tried Briar felt more of an emergency scenario pick then a comfortable one, it can do videocalls right now? Valid project btw.
Seems that’s true. Text-only communication in Briar is built by design. I see this from its communication scheme. I don’t think any other message options will come up. So I am also on it in case of the Internet outage. Besides, you can chat properly only when you and your contact are both online. Not a very handy option for daily use.
So SimpleX.Chat for privacy and Matrix for public groups.
Looks like they have ‘public groups’ in their roadmap: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat#roadmap
Matrix’s groups have an important difference from SimpleX. Even if the primary server is gone, the related servers will still have the copies.
Briar is secure and private and works reliable. However it eats a lot of battery and no audio or video.
Im not a fan of no identifiers. Sure simplex is secure with it but I would like to see something like simplex that uses 24 word seed phrases to generste millions of unique identifiers the user can easily backup and restore from a piece of paper and not from a digital backup file.
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Monero is a privacy coin that allows for multiple subaddresses.
The reason I prefer having identities (subaddresses) and to recover these addresses using a single 24 word seed phrase is for a simple one-time backup of your addresses. This will not backup anything else.
Lets say you generate a subaddress for every single friend you have and then a few years later your phone dies and you did not make a backup in over a year. The seed phrase will be able to recover your subaddresses. You may not know who address is for which friend, but as long your friend knows they can contact you and you will still receive the message.
If simplex implements multiple reuseable addresses that are generated by a seed phrase like a cryptocurrency, it will be a killer app. I am not against removing the single use one time codes to establish communications, that is a cool feature, just not possible to backup these communications on paper.
Paper backups are considered the most secure since it is not backup using a computer.
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I have not
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I am not complaining about SimpleX. Just expressing a feature I would like to see. I could try to reach out to the devs about it though.
I encourage you to contact the developers with all of your opinions and they will give you a detailed technical response to everything that you expressed.
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Personally it’s between SimpleX and Briar, but SimpleX having an iPhone app so people I know can use it makes it win out.
Simplex chat isn’t really decentralized. This makes it simpler at the cost of centralization
