paper-research-privacy-matrix.org VS simplexmq

I am trying to find something similar to discord that is actually private. Matrix phones home with a nasty amount of info: https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/tree/master/part1, Snikket seems like a decent alternative, i just havent audited it for security purposes. Any suggestions? All im trying to maintain is the multiple-channels aspect of Discord, voice/video are optional, but preferred if possible

I present to you a MUC I've created on the XMPP (also informally known as Jabber) network. I've put some thought into which network would be best fit and decided that, while IRC is an excellent way to chat, there is an apparent lack of mobile support and perhaps lacks the ability to choose a server of your choice. Furthermore, I've concluded for many years that Matrix isn't a good choice for multiple concerning reasons, the most impactful being the Matrix Foundation itself receiving large amounts of metadata and being overly centralized over the entirety of the network. Matrix also utilizes CloudFlare (a popular CDN service) which, according to W3Techs, provides services for 19.2% of all websites. I don't believe CloudFlare is a bad actor but they certainly can MITM any websites utilizing their free tier plan. One can easily check if a website is using the free tier SSL certificate by checking here. You can see that in the "subject" area, it shows the SSL domain name as sni.cloudflaressl.com. CloudFlare's free SSL operates by encrypting only the data sent from you to the CDN, leaving the data that is sent from the CDN back to Matrix.org unencrypted. This isn't necessarily problematic for the entirety of the network, however, it shows the Matrix Foundation has an apparent lack of privacy/security practices while advertising their project as a privacy-oriented chat solution. I won't ramble on too much about Matrix's suspected privacy issues, instead, I'll leave you these two write-ups to read for yourself, here and here.

it's an entire paper written by a nonprofit dedicated to user privacy. it's also last updated 6 months ago? you can view all the commits here (https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/commits/master)

I found this to be an interesting read about Matrix. https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/blob/master/part2/README.md

Not sure what exactly they were referring to, but here are some of them: https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-mat...

Of course https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq

It's about ntf-server-ubuntu-20_04-x86-64 https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/releases/tag/v5.1.3

Also, it is covered in whitepaper here: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/protocol/overview-tjr.md

Please review the whitepaper and / or website home page. I also wrote this post some time ago about why I believe that using pairwise identifiers should be a minimal requirement for a communication system to be considered private.

For more information see Simplex development roadmap xftp branch in github

The source code: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/tree/xftp

You can download XFTP CLI (Linux) to send and receive files via the command line here - you need the file named xftp-ubuntu-20_04-x86-64, rename it to xftp.

We absolutely should assume they can be compromised, but as SimpleX servers do not participate in the initial key exchange for e2e encryption, the server compromise will not lead to the compromise of e2e encryption security. I wrote more on MITM issue in this post. Further, the threat model here explains other consequences of compromised SimpleX servers.