2d ago

Encrypted messaging recommendations.

Hi everyone, I am looking for an encrypted messaging service to start using and recommending to my friends and family, I really want to get this right the first time. At the moment I'm looking at using matrix I really like it's bridges and federated nature, Although I'm not 100% sure about it's ux.

What I want to ask is what messaging service do you use and do you have any regrets with it? What encrypted messaging service would you recommended?

Edit: I just had another question are any of the bridges in matrix end to end encrypted? If person A used matrix and person B used signal could person A use a bridge to talk to person B securely?

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If you’re in america almost sixty percent of phones are ios.
If you’re choosing an encrypted chat and sixty percent of people are already using it then that’s the one you choose. The hardest thing is compliance and you’re almost two thirds of the way there if you just pay a hundred bucks (or scrounge up an old mac) and run the bridge app. Then you use signal for everything else.
I think we’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m not worried about a universal solution because I know I’m not getting to 100% compliance with any solution so I suggested the one that immediately fixes the majority of the problem. Having had to convince people to exchange pgp keys twenty five years ago, I’d pay a hundred bucks to not have to deal with that for two thirds of the people I know.
Think about it this way: if you were starting from scratch would you rather have to convince all your contacts to move their chats with you to signal or matrix or whatever or would you rather have to convince four out of ten to do that?
Obviously you’d pick the easier thing because no matter how committed you may be to not using proprietary software or big corporate apps or fragmented ecosystems you actually have to accomplish the goal of chatting with people using encryption and all the process compliance and wheedling and convincing and tech support for family members is time you could be spending talking about gardening, sharing baby pictures, plotting to overthrow the government or whatever you would normally be doing.
- Sixty percent still leaves about a half excluded and left without a cheap and convenient way to participate. You think it is fair in any way?
  Also a hundred bucks is a very steep price just for a messenger. Even Threema's cheap price is seen as an adoption hurdle, this would make people wonder why you can't just use a free app. Worst-case scanario, they'd just go back to Whatsapp.
  You'd want to make adoption as seamless as possible - and yet you're telling people they have to pay a big price (in a crisis time especially) and set some weird bridge up? They would think "Why can't we just use something botherless?"
  
  As I said, use signal for everything else.
  If immediately getting sixty percent of your chats encrypted isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you I don’t know what to say. We’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m trying to meet a goal to solve a problem and you’re trying to find the fair solution.
  It’s good to try to find the fair solution.
  
  Ah, you mean $100 just for you and then everyone in your family would be able to use it? Still a very steep price but at least you're not forcing anyone else to pay it. I just thought about messaging not just between family members and you, but between other family members as well.
  Edit: just realized what else I wanted to say. It's that the iPhone users are used to havung to install separate apps from iMessage anyway - for their friends and family members not on Apple.
  
  It seems like I’m not being clear. The goal is to get 100% on to encrypted chat.
  Right now in America, about sixty percent of the phones are running ios. ios has imessage by default. The application which those people use to do imessage is called messages (very unconfusing!) and also does texts. When you’re using imessage in messages the text bubbles are blue, rcs and sms are green. Imessage is an encrypted chat.
  If a person running android wants to use imessage they need to bridge it to their phone from a mac (messages and imessage are available on mac) using the bluebubbles application.
  So three out of five of the people you know are already using encrypted chat. If you, the op, can get on their level then you only have to convince the other two to use some other chat thing that they can do. Maybe signal or something.
  So the cost of running a mac computer as a bridge so you can use imessage through the bluebubbles android app is for you, the op, to get on the encrypted chat application those three out of five people are already on. You’d still need to use xmpp or something for everyone else but now you only need to worry about two out of five people.
  I’m pretty poor and a hundred bucks isn’t a terrible price to pay for being sixty percent there. If I could have done that with pgp back in the day (when a hundred bucks was worth something!) I would have jumped at the chance.
  Just avoiding having to explain to people that email was transmitted in plaintext and what that meant and not either have to talk them down from taking a pickaxe to their computer or convince them that it doesn’t matter that they have nothing to hide would have been worth it back then.
  It’s also a completely hypothetical cost that assumes you don’t just stumble into an old mac and won’t trade your phone in for one running ios to save that cash.
  
  Yeah, I get your point. I just was pointing out that iPhone users would want to install some messenger for Android family members anyway - so that they don't get charged per each little message (although I've heard that unlimited SMS is common in the US), and have normal-quality media. Or you mean that they'd be still reluctant to install one more app, while the one they already use is bad, like Whatsapp? If we're trusting proprietary software anyway - why trust iMessage over Whatsapp?
  Also I doubt a Huawei that cost $100 new would be traded for any iPhone anywhere, lol
  
  Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.
  If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.
  Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.
  Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.
  In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.
  I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.
  That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.
  Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.
  
  Ah, so they normally use SMS between the ecosystems? Then understandanle, although that is still weird as hell because the media on SMS is bad quality (and here would also add a lot to the SMS price).
  
  Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.
  
  Here RCS is not even supported on most carriers, and aapparently on some phone models as well (some Chinaphones I think).
  
  It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.
  It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.

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