Keybase -> Stellar
Session -> Oxen/Loki
Whatsapp -> Diem/Novi
Signal -> Mobilecoin [0]
There really is no defence of introducing this at all and it's sad that this is becoming a trend, looks like one has to look at Threema, Wire and possibly Element as our only hope.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...
Any centralized service like Threema is vulnerable to a court order to log, at the very least, connection metadata.
It's a LOT more expensive for LE to launch a Sybil attack on Loki than to get some bootlicking judge to compel logging and/or silent client update.
But yeah, I totally agree that the crypto scam is long-term unsustainable and Session needs to find a way for the users of Session to have to pay for Loki network access to keep it running.
To the point above, the biggest weakness of Session, by far, is that its official packages are released and signed in Australia. There is no doubt in my mind that .AU will eventually come down hard and compel signing of compromised binary releases. They HAVE to distribute official release building and signing to multiple developers around the world, and soon.
Does it somehow reduce the effectiveness of Signal Messenger?
The argument against Signal here seems to rest on the weakest foundation. As I understand it, it's something like:
- This could be a get-rich cryptocurrency scheme. We don't have any evidence for it, but you can assume the worst.
- The project embarking on this scheme shows they don't have users' best interests at heart.
- If they don't have users' best interests at heart, how can I trust any of their other decisions?
This is not an argument I'd want to hang my hat on.
I prefer that I can at least see it being sustainable, and if its a P2P protocol it could be free, but if they paid the developers well I would feel even better for various reasons.
That's why tor is so massive, because anyone can support it. But that's also what makes tor vulnerable to sybil attacks. It's a catch 22.
Either way, my warnings bells go off when someone asks for thousands of dollars for crypto coins that have no real advantage like Monero.
Another question that comes up with Oxen is what happens if it's adopted. Because afaik each onion routing node is also calculating the blockchain. So the more transactions happen, the heavier these calculations get, right? So each onion routing node will require a lot of resources eventually, if this ever takes off.
If you want to run 1 node you can obtain the oxen pretty easily. If you want to obtain enough oxen to control 50% of the network you will need to buy more oxen than is in existence.
State growth is an issue all blockchains face, but there are ways of addressing it. If oxens blockchain gets to 200gb in 40 years though i dont think that is an unreasonable expectation to put on the people running nodes.
So it is an issue to combine those two features, onion routing and blockchain. Because onion routing only requires bandwidth donation.
So for Session, I am unfortunately also sceptical on them as well, I would say they are arguably worse since their project is embedded within cryptocurrencies and it won't be long until they force their Loki/Oxen coin in their apps.
I did, you just didn't like the answer.
Fully distributed (while current solutions are centralized or, at best, federated), no single entity to be attacked, no dependency on phone numbers, being blessed by a server, or strange coins.
The political view on cryptocurrency that causes you to label it as a bad thing means you blanket category something that adds a lot of features to session.
I think tors uptake in general was limited because the FBI was able to still to track people, and here the cryptocurrency element fights against exactly that.
"Which XMPP app should I use"
To which I dismissed XMPP its own as a viable alternative to anything, there might be hope for Jami as long as it is not linked to anything cryptocurrency and the security is sound.
'What platform?"
Then:
Tell them.
The point is, there are far too many XMPP clients for which it is very unlikely that their friends are on and have interoperability features.
If that is the consequence for multiple fragmented clients then no thanks.
Nobody bothers with Signal and all these other fringe privacy apps or alternatives.
That is my point.
Don't project that laziness onto the entire populace, enabling others to feel comfortable that it's "too hard" to use Signal....that's awful.
Unfortunately WhatsApp has a lot more staying power and social inertia than you would ever realise, regardless of how large a social circle is, and your anecdote doesn't change that either.
Until Signal supports all or most of WhatsApp's features I don't see this changing.
[1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
1) I don't have the infrastructure or the time to self host at the moment, and almost none of my contacts have the ability.
2) My XMPP experience (using Conversations and a couple of free servers online) was inconsistent. No attachments were delivered, message storage was limited to the client side, and a few niggles in general.
3) Matrix.org tended to be slow and unreliable for me, definitely more so than Signal. And as mentioned, I can't self-host right now.
If I could, I would have moved them to an open network, but for the reasons I mentioned and others, it's just not at the same level of convenience or usability yet. I might be more tolerant of these issues for advocacy's sake, but my contacts certainly wouldn't be.
It's still relatively early days for the project (launched last year), but I guess my point is - if the things you listed are all that's holding you back from XMPP, try Snikket and give us some feedback :)
* https://gist.github.com/dllud/a46d4a555e31dfeff6ad41dcf20729...
XMPP is better than anything else I have seen for this sort of thing in that it is federated and gives you a choice of servers. There is no single point of failure.
Here is what that looks like using Conversations on Android: