Is using an Matrix account from matrix.org private and secure enough to talk with my family members and people in general?
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
Most packages/installs of Signal contain proprietary code. I suggest Molly-FOSS instead.
Molly also has some quality-of-life improvements - such as allowing to enter a device pairing link manually instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing use in a VM for registration without a smartphone), or being able to use a generic Socks proxy instead of Signal's own solution. Not only does that allow running Signal over Tor without using Orbot as a "VPN", but is also more versatile (I wouldn't want to set up a separate proxy just for Signal, and also their implementation is apparently inferior to some advanced obfuscation solutions).
P.S. Also idk if this has been fixed, but Signal's app bugged out during registration and got stuck on "no google services" warning on my Graphene device, yet Molly went through flawlessly.
Suggestion accepted, looks nice.
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.
Servers are always going to be owned by someone. But the data is encrypted with keys not available to the server. Signal isn't perfect, and I don't like some stuff they do, but it's the best design out there that is also relatively user friendly and doesn't have holes that are easy to exploit by the server owner.
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).
I have made so many people use Signal now. I sell it as, "I'm on Android. Signal gives us all of the features of iMessage and facetime" no need to mention the privacy concerns unless they are the kind of person who cares.
Great for now. Much better than doomers here who do nothing but cope.
But this teaches nothing to protect them from new scams, new anti-libre software.
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
Signal is most likely a fed honeypot.
They are super shady, blocked some important security researchers that found a vulnerability from them on all platforms, and they offer no explanation on why using a phone number is MANDATORY for signup.
No reason to trust signal IMO.
When signal publishes their client source, you'll need to explain how E2EE on open source clients can be a honeypot
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.
simplex is good as an alternative
SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:
I would not recommend it for talking to family members and people in general, which is what OP requested.
It’s worth following the project but it’s a bit too new & the funding aspect leads me to question how it will work in the long run (& being written in Haskell is neat, but boy does it have a lot of churn & maintenance issues in its ecosystem).
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.
Yeah, but it is still just one account per number, so it would make managing alts annoying. Not only is the main client (as well as the major unofficial ones, haven't found one that doesn't do that) not support multiacc directly, forcing use of profiles or VMs, but you're also at risk of whoever rents the associated phone number after you deleting the account (that or you could pay a recurring fee just to retain the number, which is just wasteful).
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).
Unfortunately even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you or take over your channel.
Of course you could run your own instance, or maybe none of this is part of your threat model, but I felt like bringing it up either way.
even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you
No, they cannot. Your homeserver admin could create an impostor login session on your account, but it would be pointless with E2EE, because it would be flagged with an obviously visible warning. You and all of your contacts would see that the impostor session was not verified as you (this typically shows up as a bright red icon on the impostor and another one on the room they're in). Also, the impostor would be unable to read your communications.
That isn't what that document says. It says that they can impersonate you in non-E2EE scenarios. The clients I use warn me when a message isn't properly encrypted so someone without E2EE keys can't impersonate someone in an E2EE room.
That being said the general concept is a problem. I would love to see progress where all events from a user are signed by a device key and non-forgable. There is some thinking about this with portable identities (such as MSC2787) where you server is basically just storing and forwarding events but the root of trust is your identity and keys that you control. But none of this will land soon, not for many years.
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.
I am really concerned about the dominance of the central instance on Matrix. It has visibility into pretty much every groupchat - if not in content because of encryption, then in all the metadata. I'd rather use another public homeserver.
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.
I know I am just a normie who doesn't really know internal workings of them... But in my experience, XMPP is just easier to host, the servers are lighter, they don't store everything they touch forever like Matrix does, and OMEMO doesn't break like Matrix's encryption. Synapse would be probably impossible to run on my VPS, while Conduit and Dendrite are not as full-featured.
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.
Why is it in your opinion better?
It's an open protocol, unlike 99% of chat protocols. It's self-hostable and federated.
It's IRC's successor and been around a long time, first popularized by Jabber. Snikket made it even easier to use.
It was also EEEed by Meta and Google to lure users at a given point, with leads some to say "it's dead" — far from it.
Edit: you may need to ensure OMEO versions are the same across all clients.
Yeah, sure. But Matrix is decentralized and federated. So you can pretty much join any instance and be able to talk with anyone on any instance. So why not select another instance or maybe even self host one yourself?
edit: didn't read the text till the end
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.
both are good, even Signal. For private conversations, you only need to avoid Telegram and other obvious ones
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.
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.
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.
why did they told you not to use signal
Matrix isn't more secure/private than Signal. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Signal has a centralized server, but has no access to the keys to decrypt any of the data flowing through them. Matrix chat rooms live on servers that would theoretically be able to access the data in the rooms, so you need to trust the server owners. Advantage is that multiple servers are involved so no one sever can kill your chat room. With Signal, the disadvantage is if you join a chat room, you can't see any past messages because those are encrypted with keys you don't have access to. Similarly if you move to a new device, that device won't have any of your past conversations because the new device doesn't have the keys for those messages. (though migration is now somewhat possible but done poorly IMHO).
So, they address different concerns. Is your concern keeping your conversations private, or keeping your conversations from being censored? Signal is more secure and private, but more centralized and easier or to fail. Matrix can be secure if you host your own server or explicitly trust the owners of all servers that house your chatrooms to keep them secure and to not sell their servers in the future. Matrix is more distributed, so more difficult to be censored or have your data lost by a single point of failure.
Is it "secure enough" depends on what your concerns are. If you host your own, then it's as secure as you are technically able to keep them secure yourself. Otherwise it depends on the server owner.
Matrix is great, you can use another instance though.