SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that.

I did not know this. I've seen people recommend SimpleX on lemmy too, but probably they didn't know.

Here's Matrix CEOs answer to this article: https://lobste.rs/c/jekh0n -- according to him the article is absurd amounts of FUD

Personally have been hosting my own server for me and friends. Cheaper and easier than I expected it to be

Fuck... Is there an alternative?
Can't use telegram cus banned, won't use signal because usa and for a while they got very buddy-buddy with the zucc, matrix requires me hosting and it isn't exactly private... So what's left?

This attitude has worked so well for allowing the current crop of tech billionaires to grow and cement their influence over the entire world. If people would just stop using their platforms when they hear the CEO's batshit views then they would be nobodies.

I think it’d help them a lot to disable new signups on the m.org home server for a while and direct people to some of the other popular options, they spend too much on their own example server imo

Are you asking if I insist that the minds behind my secure private chat have some moral standing and common sense? One would hope so. I wouldn't trust encryption made by anti-vaxer more than I would trust a plane put tougher by flat-earther. I don't want to be the hero of the next leopard eat my face song.

I wouldn’t trust encryption made by anti-vaxer

My understanding of encryption is that the point is that you don't have to trust the people doing it. You just have to trust the security research community that proved that the algorithms/protocols work. Or if you're a hardcore security guy yourself, you can review it yourself.

Also, my understanding of people is that what they seem like is no evidence for what kind of people they really are.

The SimpleX Chat is AGPL. If the founder is problematic, one can fork it and avoid reinventing what has already been made.

It is a bit counter-intuitive but restricting new signups will not help them much. The way the matrix protocol is designed, i.e. replicating everything on every server, means that clients connecting to their server have only a minor impact. As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver their costs will stay high and there isn't really much they can do about that other than shutting it down entirely.

How complicated is a federated messenger? Because it feels like matrix is the only one but there's always an issue

cheap and easy? I tried running it myself and ran into several hurdles, and gave up. How did you host it? VPS? Docker? Bare-metal?

It feels like there could/should be a good modern chat protocol and voice protocol and you just pick which interface you want to use, much like email currently does, except for chatrooms.

I like the concept of delta.chat the most. Anyone here use it? Any reason why it hasn't caught on?

Could it support technical FOSS channels with thousands of participants, like what IRC was awesome for and Matrix seems to be pretty ok at?

As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver

Is this a dealbreaker for people though?

It feels like there could/should be a good modern chat protocol and voice protocol and you just pick which interface you want to use, much like email currently does, except for chatrooms.

I'm not who you replied to, but there is a big stack of ansible playbooks for it that make it pretty pushbutton. They primarily use docker. This is what I used and I got it setup in like an hour.

Add voice to IRC. ‍️

XMPP? The clients not supporting things can suck, but it's worked well for me.