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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Anybody care to give their take on which alternative messengers are better for everyday use? Alternative as in not owned by mega corps. Does Signal have the best UX for non-technical people or casual use? Would be nice to move some conversations over to such a messenger, but don't want to force the other parties to experiment too much.

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the ones most of your contacts use, what's the point finding perfect messenger if nobody you know use it and you must move people over there and anyway keep installed other app for most of the contacts?

here you have chart comparison

https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

and alternative

https://www.securemessagingapps.com

personally I like Element (Matrix) and Threema

edit: btw. signal best UX? do they finally show users how to force send unencrypted SMS or you still have figure it out with google? I remember their great UX when they were forcing PIN verification with nag screens taking half or whole screen, which was the last drop I moved with whole family away from that PoS, let alone how unreliable it was, whole network down because admin in US sleeping waiting hours until he fix it, their approach (aka hatred) to users reminds me Firefox devs, left Signal even before it became popular

> https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

That's a nice comparison table.

Beeper is owned by Automattic (of Wordpress fame). They’re a corp but I wouldn’t call them mega and they use matrix which is an open federated protocol.

You can run your own matrix server but tbh it’s easier for someone else to do it.

Not to mention the obvious advantages of their bridges into the closed networks of WhatsApp/fb/x/instagram etc

As a bonus, you can run your account on your own server, play with it, and offer to host anyone else's that's interested as your gain confidence

signal 100% has the best UX for non-technical users out of messengers i'd actually consider reasonably secure

the best on ux is probably telegram, but i'm trying to move a few people off it anyway

I'd say that Threema has better UX than Signal, but both are fine. Neither great, but fine

I have 70+ year old relatives who use Signal. It works quite nice. Similar to whatsapp.

Are Wire, Signal, Telegram backed by mega corps though?

I meant that as some candidates that aren't backed by mega corps.

Ah, okay. I see you rephrased.

Yeah, sorry for omitting an edit message.

No problem :-)

https://matrix.org

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