Are chats synced with the mobile and desktop clients?
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Session messenger allows you to chat without linking a phone number to your account. It’s what drug dealers use lol.
Same for simplex 🫠
What really bothers me about Session is that you effectively cannot selfhost - hosting a node is prohibitively expensive. So seems like the only people who can realistically host a node are crypto bros, big companies and government agencies. Thanks, I would rather stick with IRC/XMPP/Matrix.
Fair
Simple answer to the question so far as I can see: in order to connect with someone, you have to video conference with them and show them a code. So the anonymity is only as anonymous as the video conference you use to do that. All of the benefits it claims are merely an illusion.
Just send them the code. It's okay if the channel over which they the receive the code is insecure
Top-Tec! decentralized and doesn’t depend on any unique identifiers
Here is my take as someone who absolutely loves the work simplex did on the SMP protocol, but still does not use SimpleX Chat.
First the trivial stuff:
- no one else seems to use it
- UX is not great because of initial exchange
These two are not that unexpected. Any other chat app with E2E security has tricky UX, and SimpleX takes the hard road by not trading off security/privacy for UX. I think this is a plus, but yes it annoys people.
Now for the reasons that really keep me away:
- the desktop app is way behind the mobile app - and I would really prefer to use a desktop CLI app
- haskell puts me off a bit - the language is fine I just don't know how to read it - for more practical issues it did not support older (arm6/7) devices which kept lots of people in older devices away
- AFAIK no alternative implementations of either the client or the SMP server exist - which is a petty I think the protocol would shine in other contexts (like push notifications)
- I was going to say that there are not many 3rd party user groups - but I just found out about the directory service (shame on me, maybe? can't seem to find groups though)
- protocol features/stabilization is a moving target and most of the fancy new features don't really interest me (i don't care much about audio/video)
- stabilization of code/dependencies would help package the server/client in more linux distros, which I think would help adoption among the tech folk
Finally a couple of points on some of the other comments:
- multi device support - no protocol out there can do multi device properly (not signal, none really) so i'm ok with biting the bullet on this
- VC funding is a drag - but I am still thankful that they clearly specified the chat protocol separate from the message relay, which means that even if the chat app dies, SMP could still be used for other stuff.