Session is an Australian conpany afaik. The entire app reeks of entrapment. Australian laws are all about no privacy for you.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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They recently relocated to Switzerland, after the AFP visited an employee, unannounced, at their home.
what in the fucking dystopia are they doing.
Don't use Session! It's not secure with the recent changes!
Not sure, I've never used session but I think less tech savvy people would want to use signal because it is similar to Whatsapp, which they are used to.
I used to think session is a way to go, but now..well simplex is literally all you need for communication with anyone
You can easily re-roll usernames in Signal, and profiles in SimpleX. I couldn’t find an equivalent feature in Session.
First impression: why another messaging system?
It may be fine, but what does it bring that Signal/Briar/Matrix/XMPP+Omemo doesn't have? Does it use existing standard protocol or encryption that's compatible with other messengers, to avoid fragmentation?
I think it has tor routing by default, so different in that way?
Briar use Tor by default as well for Internet connections, so I don't think Session is unique in that way. And both appear decentralized.
A difference is that Briar is Android-only, whereas session is available on more platforms https://sourceforge.net/software/compare/Briar-vs-Session-vs-Signal/
It's good that people are working on privacy-preserving tools. But I wish they'd coordinate to avoid fragmentation. Work on common/standard messenging protocols, so that people can talk to each other even using different software.
Currently it feels like going back to the 1990s-2000s, with ICQ/AIM/MSNM being all incompatible, and every single one being unable to communicate with a large fraction of your contacts.
Fair, I've never used Briar, so I was mostly responding to the others. I complete agree though, the fact that there are so many is super frustrating.
Dear god, just don't.
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
As soon as I saw the furry reaction images, I knew this was going to be a detailed and informative blog post.
Wasn’t this the blog who also got a response from session asking for a PoC and then they replied with (paraphrasing) “well it’s not my job to provide one”?
So everything in that blog post is theoretical at best?
Really bad idea, session copied signal, stripped out forward secrecy, and uses centralized file transfer servers.
This link has a helpful graphic, thank you! 🙂👍
The real alternative to Signal for myself is SimpleX. The project is still in his beginning but it's the best instant messaging we could have once polished finished
firstly , why do you want to replace Signal?
Because his grandma can't type a password 30 characters long just to restore her messages.
They are so smart and still make some choices that are so, so, *so dumb*. 'No history on a new PC for you, it's a ״feature״'. Seriously? c'mon.
History isn't stored on the server so it can't be automatically populated on a new device. That is a feature. The alternative, storing the messages on the server or having the means for one device to clone all of its messages to another device, would be insecure.
A 30 character long password is required in order to have enough bits of entropy so that the backed up messages are actually secure.
Grandma isn't moving her data to a new PC without assistance, the person that is assisting her should be competent enough to operate Signal.
Sure, so let me export my data from another PC or phone. If they wanted you to have message history, they would. So I'll respectfully disagree.
Why can she do WhatsApp but no Signal?
It's already needing to convince people to use Signal, why also making it hard for, let's say, your grandma.
Sure, so let me export my data from another PC or phone. If they wanted you to have message history, they would. So I’ll respectfully disagree.
I use Matrix and this is possible via several encryption keys. They just probably cba. How Matrix E2EE works
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As a centralized system, nothing has been shown to improve on Signal yet. For decentralized systems, I haven’t seen anything better than Matrix yet? SimpleX is slightly more secure, but harder to spin up and easier to break.
Session… there have been multiple articles written on how it is flawed and untrustworthy.
"Harder to spin up"? Hard disagree. Matrix's main server implementation is very resource-heavy, and alternatives like Conduit are not full-featured (and broke in some ways for me when interacting with mateix dot org). Meanwhile Simplex servers are pretty light and aside from a couple errors in the documentation that took a while to figure out, it has been easier than Conduit. And unlike Matrix, it has never broken for me so far.
Matrix is not decentralized but rather federated and distributed. Also synapse (matrix sevrer) have poor performance, especially when you federate your instance to others.
What do you mean poor performance ?
My synapse used to run on a 5€/mo VPS besides other stuff and ran fine and now runs on one of my on-premise servers (and not even my fastest, just some old ryzen 2700) with A BUNCH of other stuff besides it. Multiple users, a bunch of large federated rooms, bridges to other messengers ... And it just runs fine with 0 issues.
Are you talking about running a synapse server for like a thousand people or on absolute potato hardware or what is the issue ?
I'm not running a Synapse server myself so I can only speak on behalf of people I know who are. From what they told me they love the matrix protocol but it's not the same for the synapse implementation. A non-federated server can have somewhat great performance but a federated one was not worth it for them so they decided to switch to another alternative. They are not running for thousands of users more something like 40 I would say and while I don't know their server specs, I assume it's not a potato though.
I think that SimpleX is more innovative and ground-breaking than Session.
But it's a difficult concept for the average person to not have an account, but everything is device oriented. Same problem with people not using gpg for email. Having to maintain a thing similar to a private key that's not memorizable like a username and password and back that up in case your device is lost. Is a big hurdle for many. And then additionally having to share a qr code or link through some external means for someone to connect with you rather than just telling them to download an app and enter your username HSS always been difficult.
So, IMHO, Signal has the best implementation possible with the level of usability that many nontechnical people expect in a chat application, even if it's not the most secure. I am interested to see how SimpleX solves these issues in the future, though.
Of course it is, that's the innovating part of it ! My opinion was that I rather use SimpleX if I wanted to switch away from Signal, if not I'll simply use Signal not Session. But my threat model isn't everyone's.
I think as people will be more educated on cryptography in there digital lives we will have better UX to the point of it not be as difficult as sending on e-mail in the late 80s. Innovation like Bitcoin, nostr, U2F, passkeys etc... will be more accessible over time. Today sending a message on Signal is infinity more easy, secure and private than the majority of e-mails of the 21th century.
Yeah, I just meant people are used to decades of using meaningful usernames. Having to use a cryptographic key has traditionally made it very difficult to get enough people to adopt to make it worth adopting yourself as a technologically savvy person. I never would have used Facebook in a million years if it wasn't for the fact that it was the only place I could get in touch with many people. Having to build your networks in-person is tedious for many people and sharing the codes securely through other means is cumbersome if you don't have an existing method for sharing.
Just like HTTPS needs several layers to make it work and still relies on an untrustworthy and corruptible thing like DNS to verify the destination and it's keys are the thing you're expecting to connect to. There's no secure way to share the route to your device electronically in a user-accountless system with no secure, trusted middleman translating names to addresses unless you do it in-person.
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Briar doesn't even use a central server, all connections go through tor
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The main turnoff for me is that it is essentially impossible to selfhost - you use random nodes from the network, and to host such a node, you have to lock up a whole fortune (last time I looked I remember it being around $1500, might've changed) in their own cryptocurrency. They do promise returns, but I am skeptical - where would they take so much money to guarantee compensation for everyone within a sane amount of time? They claim it is against a Sybil attack, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier for a government/company to have more nodes in a situation when "competition" is reduced like this.
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