Why does it matter that Signal is US based? They don't get any of your data. And you don't have to donate if you don't want to.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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I agree. If anything, Signal was made to circumvent government spying. So it's ANTI-US Gov.
I've been using SimpleX, and I like it a lot. Very polished and reliable. The company is registered in the UK.
Try out the either Element or Fluffychat. Both based on decentralized, privacy, and security. Both based on Matrix. I like Fluffychat for ease of use and it’s on all devices. Plus you have to verify every device that signs in or that new device can not see previous chats as they stay encrypted.
I also use Fluffychat and I’m pretty satisfied. But it has its own “quirks”. I would say it’s slightly more buggy than I would expect. And I’m mostly missing the function for pasting of images from mobile device’s clipboard. It’s still doable, but in a somehow convoluted way. But once I got familiar with it, I’m liking it.
One of the latest updates allow you to use the Share button to directly post to Fluffychat. But I do agree with quirks.
Yep, that’s what I meant by convoluted. It’s: Share -> Fluffychat -> Click on Post
Then Fluffychat opens with a popup where you select the respective chat and click on Forward. And then click on Send in new popup. It’s not a catastrophe, but I can definitely imagine less steps for that :)
It's not just "based on". Element and Fluffychat are two clients that use Matrix and are fully interoperable.
(I'm sure you know, but I'm not sure it's obvious for potential newcomers)
Tue. Sorry, bit sleepy while responding doesn’t help.
Sounds great, thanks for the tip
You are most welcome. I tried a lot of various messengers and these were the only ones that seemed to fit the extreme security we need in age of fascism.
Exactly .. Element looks really good ... Now is the time to bully everyone around me to ditch the US shite and join me over there haha
Matrix is terrible for privacy. It shares more metadata with the servers than any other messenger.
From which year is that claim?
Today. Matrix does not encrypt your metadata like Signal does. The server can easily build a social tree.
The Signal server and a Matrix server, of course, have the same metadata visibility.
No they don't. Signal does not get any metadata. Matrix servers get everything and more than any other messenger. Not even the profile picture is encrypt with Matrix.
Yeah no, that's not how it works. The closed source Signal server by definition gets the meta data on your chats. It's simply needed for it to do its job. When receiving the encrypted message contents the Signal server, at the moment of the IP connection, knows the identity of the sending party. It also must know the identity of the receiving party, else it would be very difficult to make sure the message reaches them.
That's the user graph right there. Now Signal says they don't log it, and I'm sure they don't (here's where you look up what a National Security Letter is btw). If I run my own Matrix server for me and my friends, I can prove that it doesn't log.
I highly suggest getting third party reviews instead of competitor reviews which are ALWAYS SLANTED. Not to mention Matrix based like Element and Fluffychat are Open Source. Unlike Signal. Not to mention Signal provided info to US authorities fairly recently.
Element.io is a great option if you can get your circle to sign up
I've heard about https://docs.cwtch.im/, but haven't tried it. It does seem to take privacy very seriously.
Delta Chat! Mostly Germany based, email protocol PGP encrypted messenger
Threema.
Threema is swiss
I've heard of Session, though I haven't actually tried it out yet. It's Swiss.
Session is not secure.
That's not quite true, is it? There's some criticism, from what I can see, but from there to "it's not secure" is a bit of a leap. They even moved out of Australia to avoid the backdoor requirements; they clearly care, to some extent, at least.