this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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XMPP maybe?
I also tink SimpleX Chat is a good alternative.
I wouldn't recommend Signal (only the client is open source, the server is from Amazon, and you have to provide your phone number).
XMPP is terrible for the average user, its encryption (OMEMO) in most clients is not the latest version of it (making it weak) and can be turned off, a bad thing for an encrypted messenger. Plus verification requires comparing a string of numbers in most cases, something most users do not want to do or would find it difficult to accurately.
SimpleX Chat has not proven itself to be legal request resistant yet (they seem not to have any information on requests recieved) and does not have many audits. Plus it is very barebones and has bad UX. Until they fix these things it will not be attractive to most typical folks.
Yes, I know of the OMEMO issues. Most users would probably find that too difficult (although it isn't imo). It's very hard to convince people of more secure, non-mainstream tools, unfortunately.
And simplex is battery hell
I believe that had improved recently, especially due to funding from the original creator of Twitter and Bluesky.
Though in general yes, apps that are about 'extreme' privacy tend to be as they like to avoid the big corporate tech servers for notifications etc whenever possible and probably other things too meaning they have to use more power in order to get the same results as the ones that do use them.