I have it. I would use it if I had contacts there. Compared to Signal, it doesn’t force you to provide your phone number, which is great.
Well, I have it installed, if it counts 😅.
I think SimpleX wins in privacy/anonymity:
- it doesn’t require phone number, and doesn’t have user identifiers
- it’s decentralized, and you can connect to selfhosted servers without recompiling the client
Self-hosted servers are usually pretty identifiable is my problem with this. Signal can afford the legal teams to fight court orders and has adequate infrastructure in place for plausible deniability.
A vast vast majority of lusers won’t have the resources or skillsets needed to properly set something up.
Self-hosted servers are usually pretty identifiable is my problem with this. Signal can afford the legal teams to fight court orders and has adequate infrastructure in place for plausible deniability.
This depends on threat model. I’d say use your own servers to contact family and friends the government knows you know, especially if you get them on that server too. All they’ll know is you all talked to each other over that server, but not who spoke to who.
For people who don’t want associated with you, use a public server. Whether that be one hosted by the simplex devs, or someone else. Alternatively you could run one over TOR.
I’m not sure if there’s a way to set this up in the client, but based on my understanding of the protocol, it should be technically possible to allow the user to set specific servers per contact as well.
A vast vast majority of lusers won’t have the resources or skillsets needed to properly set something up.
You could say the same thing about the fediverse, and yet here we are. Those of us who are lazy or are looking for pseudonymity use public servers. The rest host their own.
Turns out you only need a small minority of server admins to handle the need of the network. Who knew?
I have it. Just not many contacts there.
Privacy wise it is better than anything else, but it is also harder to use (joining groups, managing contacts, etc).
The network privacy caveat was already mentioned - simplex proto does nothing to protect a powerful attacker from linking you with a specific simplex server (AFAIK neither does any other chat protocol?). If this is a concern then you need to use large/public simplex servers (or rely on TOR, etc).
There is one other aspect specific to the public servers, which is the room directory service. When you add your groups to the directory you are inviting a bot into the group, so DO NOT expect these to be private.
Someone offline pointed out to me that simplex has this https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private-message-routing-chat-themes.html which I am still reading but should help with network privacy aspect
Yes. I use it as a copy paste buffer between devices.
