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.

  • Avaq
    1·
    7 months ago

    You might consider joining the Nostr network and use something like 0xchat on mobile. It addresses all your needs afaict:

    • Dozens of compatible (floss) clients for all platforms and web: https://nostr.com/clients

    • Chat history is stored on multiple relays of your choosing and can be obtained by any client and then decrypted by any client with the correct private key

    • Security (of the latest encryption proposal for private chats over Nostr) was recently audited by Cure53, and they “were not able to identify any exploitable vulnerabilities”: https://cure53.de/audit-report_nip44-implementations.pdf

    • You can just use some of many free volunteer public relays, or use paid relays, or host your own if you want

    • Relays (tend to) store messages for ages to be queried by clients at later times

    • You account is solely tied to your private key, which can be migrated between devices and even clients! It’s standard practice to use multiple clients at the same time, with each client focusing around a specific subset of features in the protocol. There’s even apps to hold your keys securely and to crypt messages for installed clients on your behalf

    The catch is that development is very much in flux, and not all clients support all features. In particular there are several versions of DMs/private chat in the protocol with varying levels of privacy, and I might have gotten some stuff wrong about them. But my experience is that with most uptodate clients things do just work.