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?
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...