Matrix because it seems like the most logical choice - largest platform that’s federated/decentralised and has end-to-end encryption.

Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the group who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement.

Movim has all of the same features as Matrix without those downsides, if you’d like to give that a try instead.

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the group who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement.

Fluxer does indeed look very promising. If they can effectively pull off federation and encryption as the dev plans to do, I think that could be a great platform. Based on their more in-depth post about their background, they seem to have the talent to pull that off.

SimpleX I don’t have any experience with, though as you say, it’s covering a different use-case (I personally went with Deltachat for that type of app, which has been working really well).

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

I only heard of and became an XMPP user within the last two years, I have no nostalgia for it. I do, however, believe it to be the best federated and encrypted communication platform due to its maturity and constantly improving feature set.

The only other federated option we have is Matrix (which I’m not a fan of for multiple reasons), and in the future Fluxer.app, which looks promising but is very much still alpha/beta software and is reliant on the developer getting enough funding.

Every other Discord-like communication platform is centralized and offers no encryption, which I don’t see as a good idea to adopt in our modern political climate. Having a single point of failure is, IMO, just kicking the can down the road until we need to switch to something else again.

They don’t really need to understand the federation to use it in practice, same as here on lemmy, and same as email. Most people don’t actually understand how email works or that it’s federated, they just know to put the right @domain.com at the end and it works for them. If you attempted to explain how email works to someone, it’d sound really complicated and off-putting to non-techies too, but if they know just enough to make it work, it seems simple.

I’d only explain it to people who are curious enough to ask about it. Otherwise, all anyone would need to do is just direct new users toward the Movim site, create an account (no email required, just a username and password), and bam, they’re up and running right in their browser and can start connecting to friends. All they need to know is a username or the name of a group, which is in the exact same format as email so it’ll already feel familiar (Person@domain[.]net, or InterestingHobby@domain[.]com).

Since it doesn’t need an email and works right in the browser, it’s really quick to try. Why not give it a shot with a friend for a bit to see if it could work for you?

I imagine XMPP’s ease of use has likely increased since the last time you used it, probably best not to judge it on such an old experience?

Currently none of the Discord alternatives have anywhere near the install base that Discord currently has, and many of the direct clones are so new they have literally none, like Fluxer. If an existing network effect is a requirement for the people trying to leave Discord, than they will be trapped for a very long time.

Matrix I agree with, as I didn’t have the best experience. But Movim makes XMPP pretty simple to use. Did you have a negative experience with Movim specifically?

Stoat is missing video calls and screen sharing, both of which Movim has while still being federated and encrypted.

There isn’t really any other option that is federated, has video calls and screensharing, and offers encryption besides Matrix/Element, which I’ve personally had a lot of usability problems with, and it’s encryption has a concerning metadata issue and thus I don’t really recommend it.

Not sure where a user would need admin help with Movim, it’s pretty slick and user-friendly. I consider it the best working alternative that’s using a proven back-end technology that we currently have available.

All other centralized alternative Discord clones on the market are generally still in an alpha or beta-stage, don’t offer encryption at all, and use unproven back-ends that may not be able to scale to a large user-base. Where as the Movim client has been in development since 2010, allows for federation (like lemmy/piefed) to scale up, and is ready to use in the here and now.

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best self-hostable, private (encrypted) and federated communication platform is XMPP/Jabber, which I recommend switching to as soon as possible.

Armed with an XMPP account, you will be able to log into any open Movim instance, which is an XMPP client that offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

You’re response amounts to “Okay, so what if it was created and funded by an Israeli company known for espionage? They spun it off into a non-profit, which somehow removes any connection between those two things now.”

As to Element, they are, in their own words, made up of ex-Matrix Staff.

They’re legally distinct entities if that matters, but they’re still from the same likely compromised institution.

If you like Matrix and find absolutely nothing concerning about the connections of the two most influential entities in that space, than by all means, carry on.

For myself, I’ll stick with XMPP or Deltachat.

Not sure why you’re responding with that amount of hostility, I don’t feel I did anything to warrant it?

Matrix’s creation and development for the first 3 years was funded by Amdocs, as evidenced on the Matrix.org website itself:

How is Matrix[.]org funded? For the first three years of Matrix’s development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding. The majority of the core team is now employed by Element, an independent company set up to hire the team and support Matrix’s development. Other contributors are funded by their own employers or donate their own time to the project.

Amdocs is a telecom company that was founded in Israel, and later went on to run much of the US’s telecom infrastructure. It has long been suspected to be involved in espionage for the Israeli government.

One of their revenue streams is providing their services to law enforcement, as they admit to here, which I’m not particularly comfortable with, personally.

So you’re confirming my point

When I say 10,000+, I mean it may not scale to encrypting that amount of people in a single room, not that the service itself cannot scale beyond that. Due to its distributed nature, it can avoid being bogged down by having many thousands of users, but if 10,000 people all tried to go into a single encrypted room where all those messages would have to be sent all at once, that room would, I assume, bog down. That’s an insanely unlikely situation to ever occur, as any public server that could grow to that size would not have encryption turned on anyway (and Discord itself, the thing we’re trying to replace, doesn’t have any encryption at all).

I’ve had very consistant issues with messages not decrypting on Matrix with Megolm, and it’s known for leaking a lot of metadata. I’m also not a fan of the Matrix foundation heavily courting law enforcement and getting funded by Israel. I know it’s open-source, but combined with the problems I’ve faced using, the fact that the self-hosting side mostly targets enterprise use, and the heavy resource usage of Matrix when self-hosting, I personally think XMPP is the better option currently.

OMEMO is structured similarly to Signal’s encryption. It probably doesn’t scale up super well to like, 10,000+ users, but OMEMO can be turned off for super large channels where encryption might not be needed, and turned on for smaller groups where privacy is desired or between friends.

I agree, but sometimes certain VPN’s can be blocked if they are often used by bots, such as free VPN’s. Just thought I’d ask to see if I could narrow down what could be happening (since it works fine on my end, even with a VPN).

Try creating an account here, then use that login to log into the Movim (you can use any XMPP/Jabber account created anywhere to log into any open Movim instance, similar to how any Lemmy user can use their account to login to the Photon front-end).

It’s a PWA, so you should be able to open your browser menu and click ‘add to homescreen’ to make it feel more like a dedicated app.

There are also dedicated XMPP apps for Android and iOS that aren’t yet as full-featured as Movim, but are still compatible with the parts that are implemented (usually all the texting and calling parts, but maybe not video or screensharing).

Alternative link for the guide, since slrpnk is currently down for a bit.