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?
People will dislike this:
The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.
All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!
Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.
I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.
There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.
Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.
That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.
In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Make sure it meets your needs of course
The barrier to entry was intended to refer to others since it’s already installed on over half their phones to start with and most people are gonna be using a messaging program on their phone.
When there’s above a 50% chance the person you’re talking to is already using a particular encrypted messaging program that’s the lowest barrier to entry.
The barrier to entry always refers to other people because the hardest part of establishing private communications has always been convincing other people to actually do it.
If you really wanted to get on imessage for the least amount of cash out of pocket possible, the bluebubble bridge application random letters person mentioned is ~$100 for an old mac, and tbh that’s a high estimate in my experience. People are just giving those things away nowadays.
But most people would be excluded because they don’t have an iPhone or even funds to buy one! And would have no real way to participate! Maybe some older secondhand models would go below $300, I don’t know, but it would be weird to expect a person to buy a second phone (and an older, more worn-down one at that) just to converse with you. Even $100 is also a pretty high price just to bypass an arbitrary restriction.
There is a reason the most popular messengers are cross-platform. So the aim must be that.
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.
If you’re on Android, as well, look into BlueBubbles. It bridges iMessage from a MacOS system to most any device/OS. I’ve used it for years now with my partner’s family with very little issue (all of which were resolved with a restart).
Hard part is getting a MacOS system. I started with a VM, but eventually landed on a ~$100 Mac Mini 2014. Both solutions worked well, but the former is against Apple’s TOS and requires spoofing things, so it’s ultimately much less reliable than actual hardware.
That’s awesome! I didn’t know there was an option for android users.