73
SimpleX Chat (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hello everyone,

I have discovered SimpleX Chat (nothing to do with XChat or HexChat, or the favorite letter of some dumb billionaire), and it appears being a legit good effort at providing good privacy while retaining "mainstream" usability.

And it has been audited (by one company so far, it seems).

The only concern I have is with regards to battery life (given that it has to maintain roughly as many open connections as you have contacts, AFAICT).

Has anyone here used it? Any opinion?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 6 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

Well, thanks for taking the time to answer me, in turn!

Also thanks for telling me about the Desktop GUI, I was searching for one and didn't find it. So I'll look again.

Mind you, this is very recent and it's in the releases page of their GitHub under a pre-release. It's in the assets of the 5.3-beta release, which, now that I've checked, has packaging for MacOS, Ubuntu and AppImage. They're the ones with the *-desktop affix.

Now, concerning the absence of identifiers, the marketing material clearly mentions "[not] any user identifiers". As I understand it, it still has identifiers, but as conversation endpoints, and they are unique to a given conversation. So, yes identifiers, but their meaning is a lot harder to infer than with user identifiers. It kind of is like with using unique cryptocurrency wallets per contact, and making transfer through exchanges, converting between currencies. It is a lot harder to track.

Yes, I think you've done a better job of explaining it than me. It's impossible, to my knowledge, to communicate without any kind of identifier, but their model is a rather ingenious one for people concerned with privacy. Couple that with onion routing, and I feel very safe talking to people on the app.

And as for people adopting the app, it is via people like me and you. I run the operations for around 6-10 people in my immediate surroundings (friends and family), and my recommendations mean a lot to them (it often influences entirely what they get to use). Besides, I also advise people professionally. And, so, assuming we each influence a dozen people on average, they will, in turn, create momentum for their own social circles. That's exactly how gmail gained traction.

You sound more hopeful than I am, lol. But I too hope that technologies such as SimpleX take off, if only because of early adopters such as us.

Edit: also, something that SimpleX does is markdown editing, which is just… 👌

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    Mind you, this is very recent and it's in the releases page of their GitHub under a pre-release. It's in the assets of the 5.3-beta release, which, now that I've checked, has packaging for MacOS, Ubuntu and AppImage. They're the ones with the *-desktop affix.

    Great info, thank you!!

    Yes, I think you've done a better job of explaining it than me. It's impossible, to my knowledge, to communicate without any kind of identifier, but their model is a rather ingenious one for people concerned with privacy. Couple that with onion routing, and I feel very safe talking to people on the app.

    First, 🙏

    Second, if you generate an entirely new key for every next message, appending it at the end of the current message, while merely depositing the message at a known place (deaddrop), while using tor (or similar), there is literally no way to link two messages without decrypting the first. That would forego any kind of identifier, but if a single message gets lost, communication entirely breaks. So, I'm no a cryptography expert, but I believe there are ways to do a similar design (mitigating the shortcomings), and eliminate identifiers entirely.

    You sound more hopeful than I am, lol. But I too hope that technologies such as SimpleX take off, if only because of early adopters such as us.

    Yes, maybe, but also, a sudden swing in userbase can happen, look at Reddit and Lemmy. So it is important to have good, usable software (at least moderately) ready to kick in with a sudden increase in adoption (modulo server loads, this can usually be solved with more servers). And that is IMHO where our most important role is: bringing normies to the group, getting their feedback, and relaying that feedback upstream. So that when the user rush happens, the app/platform isn't immediately cancelling the movement due to inaccessibility/poor UX.

    Edit: also, something that SimpleX does is markdown editing, which is just… 👌

    Yes, it is quite essential, I agree there too. Signal has formatting, but you need to use the UI to set it, and that just doesn't feel as right...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent