Alright so yesterday I wanted to try to find a federated alternative to Signal to use with my girlfriend following the ChatControl announcements.

In the risk analysis, providers must check whether their services can be misused for the dissemination of abuse material or for contacting children. There are to be three categories for this: high, medium, and low risk. Providers in the highest category could be obliged to participate in the development of risk mitigation technologies.

We can anticipate Signal and co. will be part of the high risk category and assume the risk mitigation tech will be aimed towards breaking encryption. Especially since this new agency will be interfacing with Europol. I don’t see this as a win or even a draw.

https://feddit.org/comment/10169945

The first I tried was DeltaChat. To be honest, it’s a quite good app

• onboarding is really fast
• UI is close to Whatsapp / Signal
• Encryption is hidden from the user but still enabled by default

The one small issue I had was with the calls not appearing on my Android device when the phone is locked, but the call feature is still in beta so I guess down the line they’ll improve it.

In the meantime, I wanted to give other apps a try. I started with Simplex

• the chats rooms always have a lot going on. Every time someone connects to a room, it shows up in the room summary, it’s quite distracting.
• from people over there in one of the public Simplex chatrooms, there is a battery drain issue due to the P2P model, which I indeed noted and is kind of a deal breaker as I want to use that app with my gf which has a phone with already a bad battery
• people also mentioned that that there are issues with how groups are working

I then went to XMPP

• I was using https://movim.eu/ on my browser, then Dino on an app, and https://f-droid.org/packages/de.monocles.chat/ on my phone, Monal on the other phone
• There were a few shenanigans with OMEMO keys being created in my browser but not accessible from my phone, preventing me from reading some messages from the phone while I could see them from the browser. That would have definitely an issue down the line as I wouldn’t want to get my relatives to face those issues by themselves.
• One issue I noted is that creating private groups is basically creating a chatroom on the server. Monocles will hide that and just create the room with a random name, but movim.eu was asking for a name for the room, that needed to be unique for the server. Seems like there was an initiative to simplify that, but the last update was in 2020: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Easy_Group_Chats
• Also, even though calls would show up on the Android device when locked, when accepting the calls they would not go through and not connect, making this another non working option.

Then I tried NextCloud Talk as I have a NextCloud space on a non-profit FOSS services provider that grants that to members for 10€ per year. Turned out okay, but it’s more of a Slack/Teams replacement that Signal/Whatsapp, you can’t call people directly, you can just create calls in discussions (the use case is similar to Slack huddles). Once again, those calls would not show up on the locked Android device.

Finally, I tried Matrix, which I’m quite familiar with, but I discovered that

• Fluffychat, while the Matrix.org says that it supports 1:1 calls, actually does not at the moment ( https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/fluffychat/ - https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2329)
• Element X does not allow to use SSO to sign-on, so I couldn’t use https://tchncs.de/matrix/
• I registered another account on another server found on https://servers.joinmatrix.org/ , but then got an error that the server does not allows calls to be made (I think it was something like this issue, maybe a different error message, I don’t remember exactly: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues/4528)
• Then I decided to go back to Element Classic on the iPhone to be able to use my tchncs.de accounts. I then tried to call from the iPhone to the Android, but turns out you can’t do calls across different Element versions, it needs to be either Element X - Element X or Element Classic - Element Classic
• Element Classic gave me back the old verification process, where you have to verify emojis at some point otherwise they will keep showing you the warnings, I had forgotten how confusing that can be. I even had the case when I had the other session in another client (think FlufflyChat / Element Classic), but I literally could not verify as Element Classic would not show up the emoji page when I was accepting on Fluffychat.
• I then finally installed Element Classic on my Android phone, it works fine, we can make calls both ways, they show up on locked screen and actually work.

It’s a bit frustrating to see that the transition from Element Classic to Element X still creates all those issues. I will keep using DeltaChat for the text chat, and just use Element for the call features.

Quite a ride, hopefully once DeltaChat is done with their beta call feature it will fit my use case.