Let's play a game that is not a game: I'm curious what people are using for secure communications these days for groups where Signal is *not* an option (ie.

[mousyaesthete@tech.lgbt]

@sam I’m going to second Matrix, but Signal’s ease of use also means you’re less likely to make mistakes that break security

[arutaz@social.arutaz.net]

@sam yes, it's far from perfect, but until something better comes along it's my backup if Signal stops being an option.
I'm really hoping for Veilid Chat to come out of beta, because I have high hopes for that.
But I'm not sure if it supports groups it not.

[sam@social.coop]

@MousyAesthete yah, I mostly just said "No Signal" because I'm already aware of it and I assumed if I didn't put that it's the only thing anyone would mention

Matrix I am strongly opposed to personally; the protocol design is just bad and has a serious metadata problem that I think makes it not a contender here.

[sam@social.coop]

@MousyAesthete (and a serious resource consumption and VC funding problem that I think make it a non-serious choice for a federated instant messaging protocol in general, but that doesn't really matter for this use case)

[sam@social.coop]

@arutaz if the sort of security this question is about isn't something you need there are tons of better alternatives to matrix; I'm a big fan of Snikket personally (not for the use case in this question, but if you're using Matrix it would have similar properties except with a much more robust and well designed protocol under the hood, not that that's super important to you, but also a much more robust group behind it that's likely not to try to go corporate when the VC funding dries up)

[mousyaesthete@tech.lgbt]

@sam xmpp with encryption? I don’t think it’s plausible on mobile though

[sam@social.coop]

@MousyAesthete oh yah, XMPP works great on mobile (and pretty much always has, the "it doesn't work on mobile" was a thing that the Matrix folks started repeating at conferences when they were trying to apply for VC funding and was never a serious objection).

I'm actually not sure if it would be good here; while I'm generally a fan of Snikket (which uses XMPP) for general chat, and while it's metadata handling is better than Matrix's, I'm not sure that the encryption is "dummy proof" enough.

[sam@social.coop]

@MousyAesthete (disclaimer: I wrote the current guidelines for using XMPP on mobile, so maybe I'm just wrong and trying to justify my own work, but I don't think so )

[mousyaesthete@tech.lgbt]

@sam but your problem is really hard because you want to replace Signal without introducing the problems Signal was designed to solve

[sam@social.coop]

@MousyAesthete Yah, Signal probably is the correct choice here, maybe I could have just rephrased it as "Signal alternatives that work on more devices", but I am curious what other systems people will come up with that I don't know about.

[nemobis@mamot.fr]

@sam How is communication first established with those unknown parties? Can they provide an email address, for example?

[sam@social.coop]

@nemobis no preference, it could require exchanging emails or addresses or something, just so long as it's not locked into "people you invite to this specific group get access to everything" ala. Discord