Alright so yesterday I wanted to try to find a federated alternative to Signal to use with my girlfriend following the ChatControl announcements.
In the risk analysis, providers must check whether their services can be misused for the dissemination of abuse material or for contacting children. There are to be three categories for this: high, medium, and low risk. Providers in the highest category could be obliged to participate in the development of risk mitigation technologies.
We can anticipate Signal and co. will be part of the high risk category and assume the risk mitigation tech will be aimed towards breaking encryption. Especially since this new agency will be interfacing with Europol. I don’t see this as a win or even a draw.
https://feddit.org/comment/10169945
The first I tried was DeltaChat. To be honest, it’s a quite good app
- onboarding is really fast
- UI is close to Whatsapp / Signal
- Encryption is hidden from the user but still enabled by default
The one small issue I had was with the calls not appearing on my Android device when the phone is locked, but the call feature is still in beta so I guess down the line they’ll improve it.
In the meantime, I wanted to give other apps a try. I started with Simplex
- the chats rooms always have a lot going on. Every time someone connects to a room, it shows up in the room summary, it’s quite distracting.
- from people over there in one of the public Simplex chatrooms, there is a battery drain issue due to the P2P model, which I indeed noted and is kind of a deal breaker as I want to use that app with my gf which has a phone with already a bad battery
- people also mentioned that that there are issues with how groups are working
I then went to XMPP
- I was using https://movim.eu/ on my browser, then Dino on an app, and https://f-droid.org/packages/de.monocles.chat/ on my phone, Monal on the other phone
- There were a few shenanigans with OMEMO keys being created in my browser but not accessible from my phone, preventing me from reading some messages from the phone while I could see them from the browser. That would have definitely an issue down the line as I wouldn’t want to get my relatives to face those issues by themselves.
- One issue I noted is that creating private groups is basically creating a chatroom on the server. Monocles will hide that and just create the room with a random name, but movim.eu was asking for a name for the room, that needed to be unique for the server. Seems like there was an initiative to simplify that, but the last update was in 2020: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Easy_Group_Chats
- Also, even though calls would show up on the Android device when locked, when accepting the calls they would not go through and not connect, making this another non working option.
Then I tried NextCloud Talk as I have a NextCloud space on a non-profit FOSS services provider that grants that to members for 10€ per year. Turned out okay, but it’s more of a Slack/Teams replacement that Signal/Whatsapp, you can’t call people directly, you can just create calls in discussions (the use case is similar to Slack huddles). Once again, those calls would not show up on the locked Android device.
Finally, I tried Matrix, which I’m quite familiar with, but I discovered that
- Fluffychat, while the Matrix.org says that it supports 1:1 calls, actually does not at the moment ( https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/fluffychat/ - https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2329)
- Element X does not allow to use SSO to sign-on, so I couldn’t use https://tchncs.de/matrix/
- I registered another account on another server found on https://servers.joinmatrix.org/ , but then got an error that the server does not allows calls to be made (I think it was something like this issue, maybe a different error message, I don’t remember exactly: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues/4528)
- Then I decided to go back to Element Classic on the iPhone to be able to use my tchncs.de accounts. I then tried to call from the iPhone to the Android, but turns out you can’t do calls across different Element versions, it needs to be either Element X - Element X or Element Classic - Element Classic
- Element Classic gave me back the old verification process, where you have to verify emojis at some point otherwise they will keep showing you the warnings, I had forgotten how confusing that can be. I even had the case when I had the other session in another client (think FlufflyChat / Element Classic), but I literally could not verify as Element Classic would not show up the emoji page when I was accepting on Fluffychat.
- I then finally installed Element Classic on my Android phone, it works fine, we can make calls both ways, they show up on locked screen and actually work.
It’s a bit frustrating to see that the transition from Element Classic to Element X still creates all those issues. I will keep using DeltaChat for the text chat, and just use Element for the call features.
Quite a ride, hopefully once DeltaChat is done with their beta call feature it will fit my use case.
I settled on DeltaChat too. XMPP is great in theory, but the apps aren’t great on iOS. That basically killed it for me in terms of getting people to switch to it, which sucked since I went through the effort of setting up my own server.
So far, Delta chat has been working for everyone with zero issues. Maybe the only complaint is that the gray logo isn’t as exciting as the bright green whatsapp one lol
Thank you for your comment, glad to see it goes well for your contacts!
Yes I was thinking the same, the logo could use some work, the ArcaneChat one looks cooler if you’re on Andr
The one small issue I had was with the calls not appearing on my Android device when the phone is locked, but the call feature is still in beta so I guess down the line they’ll improve it.
for that usually you need to enable a special permission in the system settings, something like “display on lock screen”.
while you are there, also disable “pause app activity when unused”, for yourself and your friends too, otherwise android will not let them receive notifications if you message them.I already had a look and couldn’t find anything like that, that might be a future development for Deltachat
I don’t see Signal complying, and it’s already a target for ‘breaking’ it’s encryption. I think it is more likely to leave the marketplace in which ChatControl is forced (it’s the only winning move); and I don’t think that necessarily means you ‘can’t’ use it; if anything ChatControl environments give a framework that allows them to force supporting network/service infrastructure into blocking or restricting the ‘ease’ in which these tools can be installed, accessed and used. I would focus efforts on how people can get around this vector, not just the specific tool in use.
To save you a click, countries supporting the implementation: Spain, Romania, Portugal, Malta Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, France, Denmark, Croatia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria
https://programming.dev/comment/20807433
I live in one of those countries. If Signal leaves the official app stores of those countries, having to manually side load a client on iOS devices and keep it updated there seems more difficult to achieve than to switch to an alternative with self hosted federated servers
If Signal leaves the official app stores
I know this is probably semantics; but I don’t think it will be completely on Signal, ie the app store owner is the one who is going to have the pressure to remove the apps: plural, as they will likely also remove any alternatives in the same vain. Same with any other service provider, store front, internet or cellular access, or device maker…
- There is no strictly defined “scope” of what ChatCountrol covers. It’s as broad as scanning “communications”.
And includes things like Client-Side Scanning.
- Pre-encryption scanning - Content is analyzed before it gets encrypted
- Device-level analysis - Scanning occurs on the sender’s device before transmission
- End-to-end encrypted services - Even encrypted communications are subject to scanning requirements
What I mean by Signal complying by leaving, is that they stop allowing registration of phone numbers ‘from’ these countries, and stop hosting any of their infrastructure (AWS) within these boarders.
Self-Hosted or Federated, is only a small portion of the battle. You have a bigger problem.
- There is no strictly defined “scope” of what ChatCountrol covers. It’s as broad as scanning “communications”.
And includes things like Client-Side Scanning.
My problem is rarely how much effort it would take for me to adopt something. It’s the fact that the people I care about and the people around me don’t adopt something.
I have roughly two dozen people in my signal app, to communicate with. Out of the thousands of contacts I’ve managed in the past decades. And I’ve been using it exclusively to replace everything I did in WhatsApp, across this entire year, but the adoption just isn’t there because my cohorts are comfortable with the convenience that Meta affords them.
Everyone agrees that IG and Meta is bad for them, but they can’t be arsed to even move to Signal from Whatsapp.
That’s on you for choosing an walled garden
A non-walled garden isn’t much help for you either. There’s nothing stopping them from ‘requiring’ Client-Side - Device level scanning. The technological ‘problem’ required to do that, isn’t too difficult to impose when you also create an environment where your device/provider ‘requirement’ in order to even use your technology, forces compliance, and it isn’t that far fetched of a technical problem to be solved.
we are all awaiting your suggestions on how to install and keep it updated on the phones of our friends and relatives
yeah, let me just buy Android phones for all my friends.
My gf has her iPhone from 2020, we can’t afford a new phone yet
A short summary at the start would be helpful, otherwise this is a wall of text that isn’t inviting.
Great info, just too much at once. For example, I’ve tried most of these, so I don’t feel like digging through all this to figure out if you found the same things.
We don’t even know at the beginning how many, or which ones you tried, or what high level requirements you worked with.
Wall of text… JFC
It states in the titles what they tried.
A short summery at the top would be useful, though for me it wasn’t a wall of text and it already seems to be kept short for every option (just stating a different pov, not saying you’re wrong).
Ive found matrix to be the least bad and most practical for text based comms. I was able to setup my server along with bridges that connect to discord, telegram, whatsappp, and meta, even signal too. Its far from perfect, the UI feels clunky no matter which i try and settinf up and managing bridges was an ordeal just for my accounts to get linked, but its functional enough that i dont need to keep discord or the other apps running separately.
For calling i still rely on signal directly. Ive used jitsi before but i dont really do voice calls very often.
Nothing is at a point i can recommend it over signal to non tech savvy people, althouth briar seems promising and meshtastic might eventually be something.
I’ve been using Matrix for a few years by now, mostly only for the bridges, and the setup experience was actually way more straitforward than I expected.
Did you use the matrix ansible project for setting it up? Enabling bridges was just adding like two lines of config parameters per bridge max, and adding my accounts was just like two back to back messages with a bot and it worked. The whole server setup with the ansible took like an hour max, including getting hosting (I used Hetzner for like 8$ a month) and domains.
I wasn’t aware of the ansible option when i set mine up. The thing with bridges for me is they don’t really organize into groups how i would have liked, since very chat, even 1:1 is really a “room”, it gets very cluttered, I did eventually figure out how to bridge entire discord guilds into groups automatically but then even with that there is no “don’t notify” option for the entire group you have to individually mute each channel. Setting up each bridge wasnt too hard for the ones that let you use QR logins, but I also ended up making a really weird mistake when trying to bridge XMPP and the error didn’t actually affect me until months later when a new upgrade for continuwuity make the issue i created into one that prevented the docker image from starting, and oh boy was that a fun lesson in how to manually edit sql database files using regex.
I could go on with little nit picks about things, but point being nothing was really an insurmountable roadblock for me, just little annoyances here and there that I’m personally willing to deal with but I can’t imagine many of the folks I regularly communicate with would be okay with.
That said though, Matrix is one of those rare projects that actually improves over time because they aren’t just developing it in order to cash out with some big VC or roll out some bullshit enshittification “premium” subscription once they get enough users. So I’m pretty hopeful we’ll eventually have something good enough to pry more users away from the silos of discord and meta services, some day.
Strange I am using conversations.im with all my family and calls works fine for desktop I use dino.
Does anyone in your family use Monal? Which XMPP servers are you using?
Edit: I just tried Dino right now, I get “user declined this call” immediately
No everyone use conversations.im their app and their server too ,never used monal end clients need support DTLS-SRTP and I tired different servers in some servers calls just doesn’t work
I just spent a good part of the last two days trying to figure out how to self-host a matrix instance because for whatever reason, I’m not getting any RCS messages, so my family can send me group messages and I just never see them. Sounds like I should check out DeltaChat too.
That’s because RCS is crap - it’s backwards (tying networking to specific hardware, how 1982). I refuse to even let my phone use it at all, since it’s so problematic.
The DeltaChat relays seem quite easy to host: https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
Nice. I think my biggest issue was figuring out how to configure DNS and other settings so that a subdomain goes to the server and www points to a separete website hosted from the same machine.
If you have questions, https://support.delta.chat/ should be able to help
