I’ve been inspecting this topic quite a lot and I’m a little confused now. So, we have reasons not to use Signal, reasons not to use Matrix, there were also some claims about Session being a fraught. Briar is mostly activists related (not very suitable for daily use), XMPP lacks good clients and suffers from fragmentation of protocol standards implementation, SimpleX is too feature-incomplete (no UnifiedPush support, big battery drain on Android, very decent desktop client without any message sync). I can’t say a lot about Threema or Wire, as I’m not very familiar with them.

So, my question is — is there any good private messenger at all? What do you think is the most acceptable option?

EDIT: In addition to my post:

All messengers have their flaws, I’m well aware of that. I was interested in hearing users’ opinions regarding these shortcomings, not in finding the perfect messenger. I may have worded my thoughts incorrectly, sorry for that.

  • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is not binary like this either. There are a TON of variables.

    • You can have the IPs you communicate with visible to your ISP directly, or hidden from an ISP but visible to a VPN, or hidden from ISP but visible to the Tor network, the safety of which depends on “against whom”.
    • You can have your messages encrypted in transit but visible to the messaging server, or encrypted end-to-end and thus useless to the messaging server too.
    • You can have the identity you post under bound to an identity outright, or you could obfuscate that.
    • You can use a centralized messenger that has your whole communication graph and all metadata, or you can use a federated one with multiple identities and thus metadata scattered across multiple places. Or Briar that doesn’t have servers at all.

    All depends on whom you want to be private against, as well as how much effort they want to put into getting your information. There is no “absolute privacy”… But there is “requiring more effort from the chosen adversary than you’re worth”.