Privacy

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Encrypted messaging recommendations. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by pineapple@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

Edit 2: thanks for all the responses guys it looks like signal seams like the best option since it has really good security like many other messaging apps but it's also easy to use.

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[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[+] EngineerGaming 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.

If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.

Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.

Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.

In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.

I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.

That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.

Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.

[+] EngineerGaming 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.