Does the perfect messaging tool exist (100% e2ee encrypted and decentralized and open)?
(Note that I don't care about cryptocurrencies except for the cryptography behind it)
There are fully anonymous cryptocurrencies using ZKP where it's not possible to tell if a transaction sent is a transfer of the cryptocurrency itself or a message. It's decentralized and it's also impossible to tell who the transaction is made for (anyone with a copy of the chain can potentially be the recipient of either the money transfer or the encrypted message).
If people were really serious about privacy and secure messaging they'd look into this instead of constantly attacking the concept.
But then of course there are entire armies of shills who have a vested interest in pushing a narrative explaining that services, at best, collecting metadata and, at worst, being backdoored are offering "secure messaging".
I'm only using Telegram and I don't believe for a second it's secure and private (it's got, supposedly, "one on one" E2EE but not for groups). But at least they're not posturing as the most secure and private messenger on earth.
https://docs.getsession.org/contribute-to-the-session-networ...
As far as I can see, you can invote people to a group chat using QR flyers, but your Signal profile is visible to everyone in a chat, so everyone knows what Tina in marketing thinks about it.
Because nobody is going to have a burner phone with a data plan for a separate Signal identitiy.
For most people and use cases, either will probably do, but if you're a human rights activist or journalist in an oppressive country, I'd stick to Signal.
So that the state actor can listen on the edge of the network and infer with whom you are taking and when? Or maximize their chances of finding a 0-day in the client considering that it's the same client that everyone else's using? Or throwing it all away anyways when it's using Apple/Play services for notifications delivery?
I mean, as opposed to using something like XMPP which you can completely use over Tor and never even reveal which server you use/that you use XMPP, from a client running a secure and minimalistic OS and no service-in-the-middle ?
Some would label Signal as a honeypot and it would be difficult to falsify that.
What do you mean by "all"
Apple, at least, maintained a historical database of your phone's notifications, that it did not clean up after they expired. That includes all notifications from Signal telling you that person XXX has sent you a message that starts YYYY <facepalm>
Anyway, I'm not OP, and they have a mad setup (XMPP via Tor) which is a flaky solution most people wouldn't go for. In general, if you're not going to such extreme measures of hiding among the crowd of Tor users to mask your metadata, you're better off directly connecting and hiding among the crowd of Signal users, rather than hosting your own instance.
This is the whole point. Signal actively prevents me from using it outside of the Apple-Google duopoly. Other messaging apps are not like this.
SimpleX, Delta Chat, Matrix