Crosspost: https://feddit.de/post/8502102
Element for Android doesn’t support searching in encrypted channels and I think you can’t use E2EE in the browser at all(?), plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.
My team recently tried RocketChat, but E2EE is obviously an afterthought for that project as it has even more limitations than non-Element Matrix clients (no searching, no pinning, no file upload, no edit, etc.). Plus Jitsi integration seems to be buggy right now (at least on my Windows installation).
What else is out there that’s not on my radar? Is Matrix with Element really the best option right now? Is there no project that puts E2EE above all else?
Edit: Should be self-hostable and (FL)OSS.
Signal messenger
Not really what I am looking for. Neither is it self-hostable, nor do you have access to independent clients. Plus the requirement for phone numbers makes it undesirable.
Also, I’m not really looking for a simple messenger and more for something that is useful in organizing a team.
Are you saying you want encrypted text chat? Or do you want voice or video too?
I wouldn’t obsess too much about e2ee once there are that many client os’s and apps involved, if the server is self hosted. There will be plenty of other points of vulnerability regardless, including careless humans at the endpoints. It’s not really possible to achieve security by just choosing the right software. Real opsec is much more complicated.
Voice is a requirement as well.
EDIT: But I could get by by hosting Jitsi for that.
Molly or Signal-FOSS on Android, flare on Linux.
Flare is incomplete and the others are softforks though.
Signal sucks.
What do you mean by “independent clients” - multi device login?
There’s Wire, but it still resembles Signal more than Slack. But apparently they’ve put some work into making it self-hostable.
https://docs.wire.com/versions/install-with-poetry/index.html
Matrix is still probably the closest thing to Slack, Discord etc that actually has functioning E2EE, but also includes cloud synchronization when people can remember their keys.
https://wire.com/en/app-download
Latest Linux release is from December 2022. That’s unacceptable.
Looks a little newer to me
https://github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop/releases
But the project has definitely slowed day down since when they started it.
Yeah. Right now you have to have Signal running and connected on a phone. If the phone is off or not connected to the internet, you can’t use the Desktop client.
Signal on the desktop does work even if the phone client is off, FWIW. This might have been true at one point, or at least for other apps, but it’s no longer the case.
ETA: you can even use the desktop app without a smart phone, although the setup not for the faint of heart… Just illustrative of how you shouldn’t need a smartphone (at least, not one that’s even turned on more than once a week) for Signal to work on the desktop.
For some reason, adding a desktop client didn’t work for me, so I am stuck with Signal-cli. Good thing I don’t have to use Signal that much. Anyway, I think not having an option to register right in the desktop client is absolutely unacceptable.
Sounds like you might want to look into why the desktop client isn’t working, especially if you aren’t trying some strange, unconventional setup for getting it that way.
Signal Desktop is restricted but you can install Signal in an emulator, somehow scan that QR code and deactivate the app from the emulator
Molly or Signal-FOSS on Android, flare on Linux.
Flare is incomplete and the others are softforks though. Molly not so much, they support multiple phones / tablet. The Desktop client is bad.