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?
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.
Ah, so they normally use SMS between the ecosystems? Then understandanle, although that is still weird as hell because the media on SMS is bad quality (and here would also add a lot to the SMS price).
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.
Here RCS is not even supported on most carriers, and aapparently on some phone models as well (some Chinaphones I think).
It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.
It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.