Some will curse me out for discussing decentralization and freedom. I am NOT saying the average person should be concerned with CIA spying. What I’m saying is that one should promote decentralized internet infrastructures that empower the individual over corrupt institutions, even though this threat model likely does not apply to you. XMPP is just as easy to use use as Signal. This is the same as saying you prefer Monero over Bitcoin.

If you use Signal messenger, you have to trust the Signal foundation, which uses Amazon’s AWS for the cloud. So you’re trusting CIA military contractors. I am NOT saying that Signal is a CIA tool. What I’m saying is that you are trusting and obeying a centralized authority, as opposed to being able to run code on your own server. And this contributes to the centralization of the internet and a loss of freedom.

Signal supposedly hides metadata or who talks to whom, with a system called “sealed sender”, where it puts who sent it inside the encrypted packet. However, in a paper published by NDSS, headed by Ian Martiny, these university researchers found that Signal’s “read receipts”, which lets the sender know that the receiver got the message can be used as an attack vector to analyze traffic because it sends data packets right back to the sender. In as few as 5 messages, their team identified both participants in a conversation with a replicated version of Signal’s client.

The US Military funded Signal and Briar’s development, but yet they use XMPP. XMPP is often neglected even though it’s the most secure, private, fast, and reliable framework for end-to-end encrypted messengers.

In this animated video, it discusses how XMPP works, and why it’s the best: https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/xmpp/

Monero’s official chats are on Matrix and IRC. Some will curse me out for posting this as they prefer the commercially backed project Matrix, but the Element Matrix client is objectively slower, and it’s harder and more expensive to setup your own server. We should discuss concepts and ideas without attacking me as a person. If you disagree, state what facts you’re disputing.