Only things going for it is that it’s open source and auditable.

It’s venture capitalist funding is a hard no from me though. Same reason I stuck with mastodon vs Bluesky.

I use it, although not with people who are new to encrypted messaging or who I really need to keep contact with.

SimpleX has great features for the separation of pseudonyms, which is part of why I think it’s the best concept for an encrypted messaging app so far. But it’s not only for-profit, but funded by venture capital. I don’t think it’s going to last for the long term, and if it does, it’ll probably experience a similar enshitification that other services have. Supposedly they’re going to profit by allowing businesses to pay for their service, but I doubt that they’ll actually make much money from that.

I do. It looks nice and is easy to use. My less technical friend wanted to use something more private than texting, and we decided to use it together.

I use it, and its pretty decent. Looks good and works.

Pros: -No user ID needed. -Can self host the server that passes on your messages. -Has the option to use Flux. -Works out of the box.

Cons: -Battery drain is a thing. Either toggle the periodic check, or turn it off and open it yourself to check messages. -Using one account accross multiple devices can be a pain. Since u can’t keep using your phone account at the same time as it is connected to your pc. Can be circumvented by having mutiple accounts in the same group chat; but yea it’s a pain the ass.

Neutral: -Convincing people to use it hahahh. But this is a universal probem vs mainstream messenger apps.

Final verdict: 4/5. Very good if privacy and anonymity is your number 1 priority. It’s less of hassle to set up than some other options, and relatively easy to get people into it. Sent invite, they download the app, make profile and are good to go.

Batterydrain and same use account across multiple devices could and should be better for mainstream adoption. On the other hand if u toggle the periodic checks then I find the drain tolerable. And how many of us are in places that don’t have a wallsocket available to charge your phone :p

Conceptually, it’s a messaging app done right. Not haunted by legacy identifiers like phone numbers, can be run in a decentralized manner, and a more secure invite system.

In practice, it tends to burn through battery, and it’s already hard enough getting people to use Signal. People also seem to have a hard time grasping the concepts of invites, or anything that’s not a phone number for that matter.

I’ve stopped using it due to the battery issue and I don’t want to fragment my communication strategy further. It ought to have a privacy advantage by virtue of not needing a phone number, but at the end of the day, my messages are also getting swept up on the other end by non-privacy-respecting phones.

I use it but it is slow with notifications and I don’t like the way both sides have to agree to deleting or self destruct messages.

Tangibly even less people use it than Signal.😅

Neat idea, but in practice, it’s only practical for a single small-ish group of motivated, technical users who wish to communicate internally to the group. When you luck out with such a situation, there are many options out there to choose from, including running a private chat server somewhere running something like XMPP, possibly over tor. It’s well-trodden ground.

Signal has a completely different use case than the above. You can get a lot of regular people to switch from SMS or imessage to a Signal chat without too much cajoling, and sometimes just discover that contacts are already on it so you can start with that.

We had a small group (under 50 people) that used it daily for several months as our primary means of communication after moving from Matrix. I think the privacy/anonymity features are sound, and the creator/lead dev seemed to be making the removal and prevention of CSAM on the platform a priority which is great.

We always had problems though. Users on iOS and Windows had regular problems with the chat losing track of where it was, images not loading, images getting stuck as your “last read” position, etc. Users on all platforms including Linux and Android would randomly lose the ability to see messages from others in rooms, fail to receive notifications, or upload images that only they could see. There’s also a fair bit of feature disparity across platforms. While we were using it iOS lacked the ability to mark all messages in a room as read, meaning some people were stuck scrolling slowly through hundreds of messages a day or living with unread message counts in the thousands.

We ended up moving to XMPP. Maybe in the future when the platform is more evenly developed we’ll give it another shot, but for now XMPP is working better for everyone across multiple platforms.

this is the founder, so no.