So, I was told to not use Signal, so all that is left is Matrix. And I am not techy enough to have my own server and neither are my relatives, so Matrix.org is the only option
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It is not. We are on a privacy sub on lemmy, services that require mandatory phone number are far away from been fine to use.
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Go ahead and send me your phone number. If you don’t want to do it please provide data that i’m compromised.
I think there is campaign to get people to use signal, while servers are proprietary and other things are questionable.
It is a great operation for convincing the majority.
For normal end user average usage signal is the best option available, specially for family since they may already be used to the flow and UX of it. Simple and straight forward. All the “bad” things you read are about nerds being annoying and not liking a very particular specific thing and thinking that specific thing should be the only focus.
So just make people use signal. It’s the best and simplest way with the most common features for individuals and small groups. A simple download, in a common known place on a store without confusing people with differences between a protocol and a client and with and onboarding experience most are already familiar and ok using.
Even so you still need to make sure that the app does not have battery optimizations turned on, but that applies to all apps used for communication that are not blessed in specific phones (like facebook and whatsapp already having that setting by default because vendors make it so).
Who told you to not use Signal, and what reasons did they give? I’m very curious.
It uses phone numbers and is centralized. I personally dont use it cus of those reasons. Also wouldnt switch cus my folk already use matrix so im nt making a bunch of people get another app lol
Matrix is centralized too in practice … & syncs even more metadata than Signal so I wouldn’t call that an upgrade—especially when you see how slow the clients & servers are.
Matrix is centralized too in practice
There are plenty of different available homeservers and you can host yours.
It takes 2 to tango. It’s like trying to send an email from a self-hosted email server without following all of Google’s rules/guidelines… which means you won’t be able to send a message to most (sadly). Most folks are either on Matrix.org or a server they host in practice… you alone self-hosting will only help if you only communicate to folks also doing similar… to which if just one user from Matrix.org (or a server they host) joins your chatroom, then literally everything that is being & has been said in that room will now be synced to Matrix.org by its protocol design. With the expense it takes to self-host Matrix for a community, almost all medium-sized communities had to drop it on RAM & storage costs alone which caused most of those users to move to Matrix.org. You can run a single-user host with some efficiency, but most users are not technical enough for this. The only option to use Matrix & keep costs down is to unfederate… at least with Matrix.org (& servers they host), but that now defeats a huge part of the argument those saying Matrix is federated/decentralized.
It isn’t decentralized in clients or servers either. Almost all servers must run Synapse which is resource intensive but actually has the features folks expect as the de facto reference server & Element is the only viable client considering most users will be using Element-exclusive features like threading, polls, etc. where protocol hasn’t done a great job of providing a progressive enhancement approach to its features & so folks on alternative clients straight-up just don’t see / can’t interact with this stuff.
The accessibility to small–medium-sized communities matters if you want a healthy federated/decentralized network …but luckily there are alternatives.
It takes 2 to tango. It’s like trying to send an email from a self-hosted email server without following all of Google’s rules/guidelines…
Don’t say bullshit, a chat is not mails, matrix federation works similarly to lemmy
DeltaChat literally turns email into something more akin to chat mostly by just changing the UX. Matrix is less like chat tho & more like editing a document & syncing changes with someone but this is besides the point…
Lemmy would have the exact same issue if 90% of users were on Lemmy.ml or servers they hosted, but it is fairly distributed & not as heavy to run (nor does it have some startup mentality behind it trying to ‘disrupt’ chat by inventing new words like “bridges” instead of “gateways” & so on to put off casual users from the scent that chat has a well-worn path development for decentralization since the ’80s)
Private against who?
Privacy communities need to really drill in the idea of threat models instead of pretending privacy is some linear scale and the ultimate goal is to bury your phone and computer in a lead-lined concrete block underground. Privacy and security are meaningless concepts unless you know who your are protecting it from and what their capabilities might be. I don’t need to hide from NSA Tailored Access Operations because I’m not trying to x the y of the USA. I do need to protect myself from basic scam attackers, copyright trolls and neo-nazi stalkers. And Matrix, along with certain basic opsec guidelines, does that and more for me.
In signal, You can turn off phone number visibility and make it so that you are only searchable by username or qr code. Yes, it’s centralized, but signal is a nonprofit project with generally good guiding ideals. I use matrix for some things and signal for everything else.
Why would Matrix be the only option? XMPP is significantly better. You can either sign up on a public server or pay a small sum to have your own private server for you and your family for example on https://snikket.org/ or I think https://jmp.chat/ also includes optionally a small server in the subscription.
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Basically Matrix is to Xmpp, what Bluesky is to ActivityPub. Which all the various issues both technically and related to VC and crypto-currency funding.
In addition Matrix uses a federation model that is extremely inefficient, making it hard to run your own server once you have a few users that join larger rooms. And as a side effect of this inefficient federation model that replicates the database onto all participating servers, it tends to centralize all the metadata on the servers (run on AWS under UK jurisdiction) hosted by the for-profit company that is behind Matrix.
And last but not least they rugpulled everyone very recently and made the only fully functional server implementation open-core to upsell larger servers to their proprietary hosted offering.
You’re always here to talk to sense into the folks :)
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If it’s low privacy needs (ie you don’t have a state threat model), Signal is completely fine. I use it to talk to my friends. I also use Matrix, though federated Matrix isn’t the best for privacy either due to the amount of metadata that leaks through federation. But federated Matrix is also fine for the kinds of things you would use eg Discord or IRC for.
If you do have a state threat model, I personally think SimpleX is ideal for that, but it doesn’t have as much of a userbase so you probably need people who care enough (eg people actively under threat) to switch to a new platform. Whereas most people I know are already on either Signal or Matrix, and I’m not having particularly sensitive conversations with them either so both work fine.
Probably yes, it depends on your threat model.
If you are using E2EE on a matrix.org account then your message content, attachments (images) and most other traffic isn’t accessible to anyone but the people in the chat. However Matrix isn’t the most private option, it has a number of leaks such as reactions and chat topics (these are being worked on but aren’t close to happening).
For most people Matrix is a very private and secure option and the fact that it is federated is a huge plus. If you want something more secure you are probably looking at Signal (which you don’t want to use and isn’t federated) or Simplex Chat (which doesn’t have multi-device support).
Matrix/Element is pretty private, but not wide spreaded. For the use with friends and Family is more realisticto use Signal or any other decentralized Chat.
you don’t need to use matrix.org. there are several open homeservers, like chat.mozilla.org, but also there are people who host services for others to use. you may have a look at current lemmy hosts, and their other services if they have them.
AFAIK, chat.mozilla.org was set up on modular.im, now element.io, which if it still using the same host, is owned by Matrix.org. So even using a different host means Matrix.org might still have your metadata.
why did they told you not to use signal
Matrix.org is centralized like Signal (you can say Matrix is not centralized on paper, but in practice this isn’t remotely true). Both are stockpiling metadata in the West… what’s worse is Matrix’s eventual consistency model means syncing metadata to all servers is a by-design requirement (& also why all servers & clients are slow). There are options like Snikket to take all the hard parts of self-hosting out of the equation, but finding someone you can trust to host a server might be worthwhile. I would be wary of anything centralized.
Matrix and Simplex is fine but I would recommend Signal for family and friends. Threema is also option but not user friendly for friends and family who wants easy user discovery than sharing userIDs.
