Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptarch | Hacker News Reader

Is there a federated and/or self-hosted alternative to Signal with similar privacy and security properties? Even if it supports fewer platforms?

I've been getting more and more interested in running my own (and perhaps my friends') infrastructure, but I haven't found anything better than IRC for chat.

View on HN

I run a Synapse server (http://matrix.org/) which is federated and works very well. There are many clients but the nicest at the moment is Riot. Full encryption is now available in the Riot webclient and it's coming to the app soon.

I'm just a Matrix (and Signal) user, I haven't yet had a look into its encryption implementation yet, but for those who are interested, I think these are the docs:

http://matrix.org/speculator/spec/drafts%2Fe2e/client_server...

There's also https://matrix.org/docs/guides/e2e_implementation.html for those interested in the guts of Matrix's E2E and https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html and https://matrix.org/docs/spec/megolm.html itself. We're currently reviewing the PRs for E2E on the iOS & Android SDKs, and after they land apps like Riot will have (beta) E2E across all of Web/iOS/Android :)

Came in to suggest Matrix and its client http://riot.im. Otherwise XMPP with http://conversations.im is also a great option.

> "but I haven't found anything better than IRC for chat"

If IRC was your best bet so far, you might want to have a look at good ol' XMPP aka Jabber. If you're into Android, with Conversations [0] there's a suitable client which supports end-to-end encryption. For other OS there are many other choices with different encryption options. While OTR (Off-The-Record Messaging) might be the most popular one, it unfortunately makes multi-device-support kind of a bumpy experience.

[0] https://conversations.im/

Conversations is one of the highest-quality apps I've ever used. Buy it!

It's XMPP with everything you'd expect. Inline image, videos, presence, everything.

(if you cannot buy it, you can get it for free from FDroid but really, buy it!)

Run an IRC server on 127.0.0.1 on a dedicated server you control and allow access over SSH only. Connect to IRC through a command line client in a tmux session or similar.

What about XMPP / Jabber?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com