After the approval of the Online Safety Act, Matrix broadcasted an alert anticipating age verification on Matrix.org starting from 7th of August.
There are many alternative chat platforms currently available, yet Bisq has strict requirements:
- open source
- self-hostable
- strongly privacy oriented
- decentralized
- uncensorable
- fairly battle-tested
- sensibly user-friendly
…which narrowed down our choices to just SimpleX and Session.
SimpleX has the stronger protocol when it comes to privacy, and allows to connect through a proxy. Its default network servers are known, so they could become a target for institutional entities, but the issue is entirely avoided by running a set of federated network servers on tor. Setting the client this way would add some friction for some users, because it will require running a local tor proxy and editing the servers list to use Bisq custom ones, but the end result would be a stronger architecture, and it will not be strictly required from day 0, anyway. Another quirk of SimpleX is a flaky multi-device support, which usually means having to setup one account per device, and have all of them connect to the rooms you want to be in.
SimpleX has received a security audit on december 2024
Session, on the other hand, runs on an onion-routing network that includes upwards of 1000 community managed nodes, and it comes as a decentralized and uncensorable chat out of the box, at least by specs, but it does not allow configuring a proxy, and there are critical reviews about its real protocol security (eg. Don’t Use Session (Signal Fork) - Dhole Moments). While, on one side, it appears already featuring all of the requirements, on the other its protocol is inferior to that of SimpleX.
Continuing to run matrix on a self hosted server has been briefly considered, but even self-hosted synapse homeservers end up sharing metadata with central servers, according to the matrix protocol, so the time for a proper platform switch has come (Why We Abandoned Matrix: The Dark Truth About User Security and Safety - Meta - Hack Liberty)
After considering the above, please give your opinion in this survey