this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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The thing is... What alternatives are there? Signal can't be trusted (on the very same website there is an article about it). I'm not using closed source alternatives, Simplex is kinda shady too tbh and I'm not even sure I could get anyone to use it.
I don't like Matrix/Element either but sadly its the best open source chat solution we have.
Counterpoint: this is just some random blogger and you don't need to follow any of their advice.
Why don't people trust Signal?
Signal itself is solid. For now. The issue is that signal is a centralized infrastructure service that is based in the US.
While it's rather unlikely that something shady is going on and the current administration manages to pressure someone into installing back doors without anyone noticing, there is a growing chance that at some point the Orange Hitler or his cronies aim at Signal - and simply shut the whole thing down in a single sweep.
Which would mean the whole thing is lost - in theory they of course could rebuild a foundation outside the US, but that would also mean they need people not residing in the US (not like Proton which claims to operate from Switzerland and in reality are US based) and find funding there - enough funding to cover the costs and that is not impeded by US pressure.
This is the scenario that makes Signal a problematic candidate - and sadly the foundation is doing nothing against it.
Its a 18 months old but OP means this on the same site. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/if-you-must-use-signal-use-molly/
The blogger also stopped using proton mail. So idk. Seems to be their thing atm.
I started reading the article but didn’t finish. This guy is a fool. He’s bitching about vendor lock in? The data isn’t supposed to be portable. That’s the point.
The article author went back to XMPP, which does appear to be the best option currently.
In what universe is XMPP better than Matrix?
XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to """cut corners""" compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn't really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly "the same result")
An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren't specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.
Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn't make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.
XMPP also doesn't change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.html
XMPP doesn't change very very often, but there's actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004
The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don't need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn't support the same XEPs.
I'm general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that's neat! But you can't really judge the core to say how often things change.
IRC makes sense in a world where people register to bouncers, which allow people to connect to any IRC network they please.
xmpp mentioned, I'll add IRC
Going back to TS3 and IRC. They never left
I forgot to add nextcloud talk!