Best privacy chat apps

"Berty is still under active development and should not be used to exchange important data.

The current Berty Messenger implementation is not using the Berty Protocol yet, but OrbitDB directly. Which means the encryption is not safe, but the good news is that the current Berty Messenger app is already a P2P one!"

https://berty.tech/docs/berty/

marcusquinn

Just stumbled across this, maybe interesting, well reviewed too:

doodlemania2

yall should also check out Session (getsession.org) it's pretty sweet - a fork of Signal protocol with the backend using the Loki/Oxen network and in the table above, requires zero of the 19 permissions that Signal requires. I personally REALLY enjoy it.

The downsides are obvious here in the usability department. In order to get to chatting with someone, you HAVE to exchange keys. Signal makes that easier cause they generate QR codes but also integrate with your contacts.

One thing to note, however, as a plus to Signal, is they use confidential computing on Azure to hide all the contacts processing, which is a really great use of that particular tech.

marcusquinn

@doodlemania2 I did give Session a try, kinda felt primitive and like persuading anyone to switch from Signal would be at the expense of losing features for marginal additional privacy.

get that the metadata with Signal isn't private, and that's annoying, but the main thing for me is avoiding using Facebook/Google products.

I'm sure Session will continue to evolve, so hopefully they don't lose momentum and have the capability to reach feature parity with the current most popular apps.

ianhyzy

@marcusquinn yeah, a lot of alternatives to signal look neat but fail at being cross platform or easy for normal people to use

I've had to ditch Signal. It has been a nightmare to use. Notifications on Android and iOS are both spotty. My mom had missed calls several times because it just never rung for her (I verified this). Also for video calls it occasionally decides speakerphone is not needed, and won't work.

0/10 somehow Element + Matrix is more usable.

robi

The frequent disconnections from Telegram and Signal are problematic.

It's like someone is deliberately disconnecting all sessions they can't intercept. Making it a lot less reliable.

Sometimes video calls are better, and you can always stop video sharing, keeping the voice channel open.

Same with GVoice calls, frequent drops, despite good networking on both sides.

One of the better things for longer lasting voice comms is Team Speak. But the lack of availability of free clients on mobile puts that in the 'only at home' category.

rmdes

I'v been testing https://cwtch.im/ it's quite interesting, since you can host the server home
and join other chats/servers or one-to-one over tor

marcusquinn

@rmdes Nice! Looks like the list here has been updated since I last posted it:

https://www.privacytools.io/#messaging

robi

@rmdes sounds like a good app request?

LoudLemur

@marcusquinn

Session
https://getsession.org
Session will soon support video over Lokinet.

Berty
https://berty.tech/
Berty is based on IPFS (Inter Planetary File System), and near release. Keep an eye on it.

Cwtch
https://cwtch.im/

marcusquinn

@LoudLemur Thanks. Session I like, worth a follow: twitter.com/session_app Anyone can DM me for an ID to connect if you want to test anything.

Video calls will be the game-changer for that, at least if they can have a comparable quality to FaceTime/Zoom, which are currently the best-of-(non-open-source)-breed in my experience.

Berty & Cwtch I need to try, both also sounds very cool.

The original point of this post being "Off-topic", was for non self-hosted, or not being dependent on self-hosting. The kinda thing you could give your folks to use and they'd have a low friction experience, and it would work well enough for them to also like and recommend to friends once they were also onboard. (something I still even struggle to convince people that really ought to trust me on, because lazyness & what's the point inertia is a very real thing targeted by the spyware that has become ubiquitous with "social media" and "big tech".

marcusquinn

Have created a "Cloudron" Group in Session, for both testing, and off-the-record chat (well, as much as all other members have a record). DM me for my Session ID. It's probably safe to post publicly, but no hurry to find out otherwise from haste

marcusquinn

Anyone tried this "Status" app to the above aims? Looks intriguing at least:

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn while there are few good interesting ideas floating around in the web 3 space, and loads of money sloshing around to help experiment with such ideas, personally I find it mostly to be a big turn off for being a slow, expensive, and environmental nightmare.

Oh gosh they incorporate “web3”

marcusquinn

@jdaviescoates Wait until you see how much energy humans consume to do the things the miners are replacing

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn like what? What are they/ have they replaced. Nothing as far as I'm aware.

A single Bitcoin transaction uses more energy than an average U.S. household uses in 2 months!

I mean, perhaps you're referring to how much banks still invest in fossil fuels? But if you think web3 is going to replace banks any time soon you are wrong

A 10-year old iPhone could process more transactions per second than the entirety of the Bitcoin network it's so insanely slow.

marcusquinn

@jdaviescoates Think that's one for the rest of the internet to debate. Personally, I see the incentives for more progress in energy production, efficiency, distribution and security as a good thing.

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn said in Best privacy chat apps:

I see the incentives for more progress in energy production, efficiency, distribution and security as a good thing.

OK, but Web 3 does that how?

It's really not very distributed at all and pretty much the whole ecosystem relies on a tiny handful of privately owned and controled entities, just like Web 2

See eg this nice critique by Signal's creator:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Also, what are these high energy "things the miners are replacing"?

marcusquinn

Also, what are these high energy "things the miners are replacing"?

Bankers.

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn said in Best privacy chat apps:

Bankers

Yeah. Thankfully, whilst most banks are still investing in climate catastrophe, not all are.

I do personal banking with Nationwide and business banking with Starling, neither of which invest in any fossil fuel companies nor projects.

https://bank.green is a useful website for checking how much your bank has invested in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement.

The worst offender in UK/ Europe are Barclay's

See also:

The Banking on Climate Chaos report:
https://www.ran.org/publications/banking-on-climate-chaos-2022/

Recent issue of Ethical Consumer magazine on banking:
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/sites/default/files/flipbook/Issue186/

I'd suggest moving money to more ethical banks (and pensions if you have one, see eg https://makemymoneymatter.co.uk/ ) is a far more effective action than using all the insanely wasteful web3 stuff

Probably also worth mentioning:
https://www.ethex.org.uk/
https://www.abundanceinvestment.com/
https://www.wearemoneymovers.com/

Happy ethical banking everyone!

marcusquinn

@jdaviescoates This we agree on.

I wouldn't worry about the "energy costs" of PoW blockchains, a large amount of the excess heat can be reclaimed and re-used, and it is motivating and diverting more funds to renewable energy investment, because ultimately, cleaner energy is also cheaper energy for all.

necrevistonnezr

@marcusquinn I highly doubt that the average miner running 100 AMD cards re-uses any of the excessive heat.

It‘s just a stupid system under which numbers are crunched that don’t need crunching and which gave rise to money laundering and cybercrime at an unprecedented level. There’s not one ransomware attack without cryptocurrency involved.

I don’t know why less oversight in finance matters would benefit anyone. And is there one aspect of cryptocurrency that has benefited society as a whole?

This is off topic...

But I will say that crypto tends to be defended by those who make abnormal amounts of money off of it. Also miners can have a special corner of hell for the GPU shortage. Web3 is not needed. Its just a way to ram "bLoCkChAiN" into everything. Decentralization does not and will never need blockchain. Source: activitypub.

marcusquinn

@necrevistonnezr I heated my whole house with GPU mining this winter, so self-proclaiming my own confirmation-bias.

I like learning, and I like primary source information. I could have taken any bunch of opinions, regurgitated them and moved on, but I just like to know — and I'm satisfied that I can make my home-heating consistently profitable to fund other hosting and research projects.

I guess a significant part of the developing world, that now has an alternative currency to trade with, might be voting with their usage, and good for them.

If there were no utility, I'm sure the costs in chips & power would not be funded indefinitely, get here we are, 10-years in and mining, trading, and all sorts of other applications both exist and grow.

Like most things, none of us truly knows the future, and in many ways how the present works either, but I do like the idea that self-determination can survive and thrive in the face of accelerating AI capabilities — for which, soon enough, these public words are merely food for their modelling, and the utility of anything online will only be as good as the trust of either the few or the many that control the network we've taken for granted as being secure enough to rely on.

Maybe we're just being tricked into generating the computing power that an artificial hive-mind craves, who knows?

The Sun, 1991

Daily Mail, December 5, 2000

LoudLemur

@jdaviescoates said in Best privacy chat apps:

@marcusquinn like what? What are they/ have they replaced. Nothing as far as I'm aware.

A single Bitcoin transaction uses more energy than an average U.S. household uses in 2 months!

I mean, perhaps you're referring to how much banks still invest in fossil fuels? But if you think web3 is going to replace banks any time soon you are wrong

A 10-year old iPhone could process more transactions per second than the entirety of the Bitcoin network it's so insanely slow.

Wow! That is amazing. I had no idea.

marcusquinn

@LoudLemur That's the wonder of statistics. Rarely are they every questioned, and you can always find one that supports your argument.

I'm not saying anything is true, if you found it online, there seems to be an increasing chance it is biased. I'm just saying, there's a fact for every occasion now, and the quoting of them usually tells you more about the hopes, belief or fears of the quoter, than they do about the subject matter.

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn whilst you have a valid point about stats, that's a very silly graph.

The banking system is many many MANY orders of magnitude larger than the whole web 3 ecosystem, let alone bitcoin.

It's not even comparing apples to pears, it comparing a grain of sand to a whole beach.

Now do same figures per transaction

byghuutran

Someone has purpose to make money from Signal or open source chat app like this?

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Best privacy chat apps