I am really struggling to replace facebook messenger / whatsapp for a few casual conversations. My friends and I are all wanting to move away. We are not heavy users of this but need it to work. I think the requirements are:

floss client for android, linux, windows
persistent history across devices
reasonable security
don't need to self host server
can send a message to offline user, they get it when they come online
not tied to or reliant on phone number / cell service
ETA: end user documentation explaining how to set up and common troubleshooting

tried:

matrix: the thing with having to keep track of room keys and stuff is too complicated. every time someone uses a new device it is a ton of issues and we could never quite get it ironed out
signal: tied to phone number, no history across devices
xmpp: similar to matrix the key situation is confusing, also no cross device history
ETA: simpleX: a lot of people here are mentioning simpleX. It didn't come up in previous investigations so will give it a shot.
- ETA 2: It doesn't seem to have persistent history across devices. Clarification?

I actually didn't think this would be such a problem but it is breaking us. we don't need a lot of sophisticated features like voice, video, moderation, 1000s of participants, spam protection etc that seem to be of concern to the projects. just simple text chat.

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[–] oranki@sopuli.xyz 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I have a feeling you are overthinking the Matrix key system.

create account
create password you store somewhere safe
copy the key and store somewhere safe
when signing on a new device, copy-paste the key

Basically it's just another password, just one you probably can't remember.

Most of the client apps support verifying a new session by scanning a QR code or by comparing emoji. The UX of these could be better (I can never find the emoji option on Element, but it's there...). So if you have your phone signed in, just verify the sessions with that. And it's not like most people sign in on new devices all the time.

I'd give Matrix a new look if I were you.

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I tried both of those. I don't know if I got confused about which key was the right one or what but that didn't work. I also didn't really get what the key was for... it was attached to my account, or to the conversation.....? Ended up with multiple keys and trying to guess what they are for. And since I'm not the only one involved and others were having issues it was just constant headaches.

The emoji thing I did and it also just seemed to fail. Like I would get through it and it's still not working. Sometimes it works after a few tries another other times not.

I think that having a few people all trying to move together kinds of exacerbates all these issues to be fair. Because everyone is setting up multiple devices (maybe trying different clients on a given device) and trying things out. Normally you just wouldn't be doing that much logging in. And none of us could really help the others out. If it was just one person joining an established network I don't think it would be so annoying.

[–] oranki@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago

They could explain things better, you are right. I actually think I remember having almost the exact same confusion a few years back when I started. I still have two keys stored in my pw manager, no idea what the other one is for...

The decryption has gotten much more reliable in the past year or two, I also try out new clients a lot and have had no issues in a long time. Perhaps you could give it a new go, with the info that you use the same key for all sessions.