What Matrix/Discord/Teams alternatives are there that FULLY support E2EE across Desktop and Mobile?

Crosspost: 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.

Pantherina,

Element.

poke,

Uses Matrix

Lemmchen, (edited )

Things I will take a look at:

  • jami.net (really isn’t there yet)
  • spacebar.chat (only has a web client right now, EDIT: Does it even have E2EE right now?)
  • keybase.io (not self-hostable and not tailored for organisational use, EDIT: Maybe it is?)
  • tryquiet.org (still missing some core features like direct messages)
  • www.rocket.chat (E2EE not implemented to a satisfying extend)

Things I will not take a look at:

Feel free to add more suggestions.

ono, (edited )

Keybase was popular with some Hacker News users for a while, but now that it’s owned by Zoom, anyone concerned about privacy ought to think twice before using it.

XMPP might be worth considering if you’re hosting for yourself and all your contacts. I suggest avoiding it for public use, mainly because features are piecemeal and coordinating them across everyone’s clients and servers is a bit complicated. (Also, I don’t know if there’s a good XEP for encrypted search.)

Lemmchen,

Yeah, it’s sad to see it in Zoom’s hands, but it is still open source and receiving updates.

pescetarian,
@pescetarian@lemmy.ml avatar

Try Deltachat, maybe…

Lemmchen,

Interesting project, but too simple in its feature set.

FriendBesto,

I really like DeltaChat. Highly recommend.

furzegulo,

simplex chat maybe?

pescetarian,
@pescetarian@lemmy.ml avatar

Simplex eats battery 🔋

furzegulo,

i always freeze it with sd maid when i’m not using it

po_tay_toes,

IME 40-60% per cycle, even when connecting to an empty, self-hosted relay. Quite literally a killer feature.

Pantherina,

There are many options to choose from.

SimpleX is supercool and the best for normal anonymous messaging. Not for companies, school, etc.

Lemmchen,

I don’t think SimpleX is the right tool for collaboration efforts. I could be wrong though. The last time I tried it was two years or so ago.

Phen,

What issue did you have with the jitsi integration on rocket.chat?

toastal,

Jitsi runs XMPP under the hood so why not just use that as your chat server instead of running two separate servers?

Lemmchen,

First of all Jitsi isn’t part of the rocketchat-server package, so you need to set it up yourself or use a hoster, which both require separate accounts from the RocketChat ones.

The specific issue I had on Windows was that RocketChat wasn’t registered to handle jitsi-meet:// links, it would just open a blank “open with” Windows dialog everytime. In general the “integration” seems lacking, the whole UX is really bad compared to Matrix/Element where voice calls just work.

Phen,

But where did those `` jitsi-meet://` links come from?

The calls generated inside rocket.chat are supposed to be handled by the rocket.chat app, everything else it doesn’t get involved with.

(I wrote this integration so I’m legitimately interested in how it could be better)

Lemmchen,

I wrote this integration

Oh, nice! I can make a video later on how it looks on my machine. I even tried fiddling with the registry to force them to be opened with RocketChat, but that didn’t work either.

Lemmchen, (edited )

I’ve made some screenshots instead of a video. I hope you still get what the issue is.

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/4646efb4-d396-479d-89a4-32d5fe84e1f3.png

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/334ca559-093b-4205-a9cb-7775ddd4447b.png

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/a3caeacc-2221-477e-89c7-a5afeeb2c6fc.png

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/e462c49a-0b66-42fa-9809-0a2b55d962e7.png

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/7bb8d84e-3139-4026-bbcb-f7ac2a5ac18a.png

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/6969d9d6-0082-4839-9df9-a4edf43159f4.png

At the end there is no usuable call from the RocketChat client. But I can copy the meet.jit.si URL and open it in a browser.

Originally I had an error message telling me that Windows doesn’t know what to do with jitsi-meet:// links, but that doesn’t show up anymore for some reason. Maybe because of me messing with the registry to solve the issue, but I’ve actually removed the registry key I had created before.

Phen,

Thanks! I got it now. I’ll look into it this week.

Phen,

Ah I had that popup confused with one of our own; Now that I checked the text on google translate I figured out what’s happening.

The meet.jit.si domain is a public jitsi instance that is kept by jitsi themselves. They recently implemented this login requirement on that domain (one user in every meeting must authenticate); They probably assumed that those meetings would always be in a browser and our desktop app is not handling that authentication flow properly. I’ll register a task for someone from our app’s team to take a look.

If you host your own jitsi instance, this login requirement won’t be there and you won’t have this specific issue (though I assume you probably won’t stay with Rocket.Chat anyway due to the E2EE requirement).

uzi,

Does XMPP with OMEMO give you what you are looking for, or am I misunderstanding?

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

In regards to e2ee probably, but they seem to have very specific feature requirements for a team-chat, which current XMPP clients do not fulfil.

However I do wonder about the fixation on e2ee. In a self-hosted scenario with TLS encryption (and local users only) there is no real need for e2ee.

Lemmchen,

The server is not hosted on premise and the team will exchange communication that requires to remain private. That’s why I really need E2EE for everything (and why RocketChat is not an option as E2EE is not fully implemented).

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Why not move the server on premise? e2ee is a very imperfect protection against metadata leaks and running the servers on premise has loads of other advantages.

Lemmchen,

There isn’t really a premise per se as we are a decentralized team, but the details don’t really matter.

po_tay_toes,

You’d have to be crazy not to be paranoid these days.

Pantherina,

Its crazy how Tech Giants burst out chat apps like nothing.

Having a good client based on Conversations with some stuff added would cost nothing.

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Not Conversations based, but you might want to keep an eye on: prose.org (fully open-source and XMPP standard compatible)

Pantherina,

Thats cool! A bit too much of these stupid emoji people but looks nice and futureproof?

ono,

Correcting some misconceptions…

Element for Android doesn’t support searching in encrypted channels

That’s true of regular Element for Android, but it’s being replaced with Element X (which is built with Rust). I would expect search to be added there if it isn’t already.

and I think you can’t use E2EE in the browser at all(?)

I have done it in Firefox, so that’s false. Perhaps you had trouble with a specific browser?

plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.

Nheko handles E2EE just fine, so that would seem to be false as well.

Since you’re looking for recommendations, it would help if you said which clients you tried and what problems you had with them.

In case you haven’t seen it, you can set a Features: E2EE filter on this list:
matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Lemmchen, (edited )

I would expect search to be added

That’s what I expected fo regular Element for Android as well, but it never came into existence.

Element X

I fail to find a feature comparison between the two. Does it have feature parity with Element yet? If not, what’s missing?

Firefox

Firefox is my main browser and has been for the last 15 years or so. It definitely was Firefox, but maybe I’m confusing it with a different issue. There definitely was some feature in Element Web that didn’t work and told me to use Desktop instead, unless I’m imagining things now.

Nheko

Interesting, I’ll take a look.
EDIT: Nheko is NOT a mobile client. I’ve misinterpreted your statement.

matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

That unfortunately doesn’t specify the extend of the E2EE support (like search), but I appreciate your effort.

LWD,

There definitely was some feature in Element Web that didn’t work and told me to use Desktop instead, unless I’m imagining things now.

It’s search.

Even in Element, last time I checked, search was incredibly half-baked and mostly useless.

I know you don’t want to use Signal, but it actually has searches that function.

ono,

Back when encrypted search was being developed for the Electron app, I think someone had it working in a standalone browser as well. Perhaps that was with the help of a browser add-on; I don’t remember for sure. I suspect github.com/t3chguy would know, as he seems to be active in discussions of that feature. It might be worth asking him about it.

Pantherina,

You cannot compare Signal to Element at all.

Like, at all.

Signal has no search for Groups, there are no public groups or channels. Signal has a monopole server that is supposed to be OpenSource but nobody can run their own one.

LWD,

Strange reply.

  • Read the post, the use case doesn’t require public groups.
  • Read the messages above, I was talking specifically about search
  • Does this mean that Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?

Etc

Pantherina,

Yes, search on Signal is fundamentally less complex than on Element because there are no Groups or Servers to search.

You are talking about searching in local messages I guess, which is unrelated and should work everywhere.

Telegram, Signal and Element are 3 different products. Signal is very restricted but encrypted. Telegram is way less restricted, the desktop client is somewhat standalone but has no encryption which is bad. Element is way more complex and allows encrypted and unencrypted.

LWD,

More weird assertions.

Signal has groups.

And I asked, is “Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?”

ono,

Does it have feature parity with Element yet?

Not yet. It’s in beta.

element.io/labs/element-x

EDIT: Nheko is NOT a mobile client.

If you specifically meant mobile, you could have said so. Your statement was, “every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.” Nheko disproves that statement. It also suggests that some alternative mobile clients might handle E2EE at least as well as it does. You might want to try them.

By the way, text search with end-to-end encryption happens to be tricky to implement, and Matrix projects aren’t funded by corporations with deep pockets. Tempering your expectations regarding development speed is probably worthwhile here.

Pantherina,

Element X works really well but Servers need to additionally run the sliding sync program. They still run normal synapse, but the sliding sync needs to be added. I could not find a list of Servers that have that installed.

haui_lemmy,

Thanks for the great explanation. You said it a lot better than I could.

Imo, matrix is worth using if the bugs dont make it impossible (which they dont for me).

For peeps that absolutely need the perfect finish (which sounds like mixed priorities but maybe its just me) one could use signal.

Peeps who need polished stuff and great privacy should probably pay for it.

moon, (edited )

Matrix, Signal, Session. If there was anything as mature an feature complete that you’re looking for, you’d probably already have heard of it

UnHidden,

Signal messenger

Lemmchen, (edited )

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.

solrize,

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.

Lemmchen, (edited )

Voice is a requirement as well.
EDIT: But I could get by by hosting Jitsi for that.

LWD,

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.

docs.wire.com/versions/…/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.

Lemmchen,

What do you mean by “independent clients” - multi device login?

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.

LWD,

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.

EngineerGaming,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

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.

LWD,

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.

Pantherina,

Signal Desktop is restricted but you can install Signal in an emulator, somehow scan that QR code and deactivate the app from the emulator

Lemmchen,

Wire

wire.com/en/app-download
Latest Linux release is from December 2022. That’s unacceptable.

LWD,

Looks a little newer to me

github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop/releases

But the project has definitely slowed day down since when they started it.

Pantherina,

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.

Pantherina,

Molly or Signal-FOSS on Android, flare on Linux.

Flare is incomplete and the others are softforks though.

Signal sucks.

SidewaysHighways,

What about session? A buddy of mine started using session and so far so good maybe

Lemmchen, (edited )

I’ve used Session for quite a while. It is not something I would use in a professional environment where reliability is required.

Pantherina,

Yeah its overkill.

Also important things in my opinion:

  • spaces
  • admin rights management, roles
  • group invite links
  • device management (logging out a lost phone etc.)

I think a slimmed down Element with a selfhosted matrix server and no federation is the best for companies

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