Dualtronic

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A mess of messengers

The market for encrypted messengers is a mess, but it's still worth trying out alternatives and seeing what works.

Hot take: lately everyone talks about moving to Signal. I get it: Signal is the most secure app in its class. Still makes me uncomfortable, for two reasons:

It's still one of those shitty messengers that's tied to your phone and phone number, that you can lose so easily.
Their client is only open source in theory. Due to additional restrictions, it can't be distributed or forked by third parties.

A friend (hi, David!) mentioned Session as a potential alternative. It sounds good from the official website, but for a few details:

He says notifications work poorly if at all.
The Android app would take up more space than my Termux install.
Seems it's not even very secure.

But I happened to mention Jami in the same conversation (on Mastodon). Since we were both in the mood to fool around, we gave it a try. Surprise! It's very nice and easy to get started with – just skim the docs first – and simply works. Remarkable given its distributed nature. The desktop app is even included in the Debian repositories. An older version, but it still connects. The F-Droid edition is updated much more often, so that's fine. As a bonus, it's not tied to the official servers. Anyone can run their own, at least in principle.

Obviously I have no idea how secure it is, and other downsides might become apparent later. But the first impressions are really good.

Contrast with Matrix, whose issues with encrypted chats are the butt of everyone's jokes. As for XMPP, it's now a small niche. It's always good to have alternatives, anyway.