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.

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.

Seems to be better and i have it but… network effect, as is always the case with messaging apps.

I have it and used it in the past. It’s better in privacy than Signal since it’s decentralized and doesn’t use any identifiers. Signal forces you to use the worst identifier ever: your phone number. It should be optional (as Threema) for easy contact discovery, not mandatory. Back to SimpleX, I stopped using it because every time you have to connect the computer to phone if you want to use it from computer (it’s for maximum security, but inconvenient for me). But it’s a great app.

Tangibly even less people use it than Signal.😅

I use it and yes, it is quite noticeably better.

Connecting to somebody new with a new pseudonym is completely possible by just tapping one switch in the share screen.

Plus, you don’t need a phone number which does generally require at least some personally identifiable information to obtain

Do be aware though, your database is an incredibly important file. If you lose your database or lose the password to your database, you are completely screwed just as if you lost cryptocurrency. Those accounts are burned forever because you will never have the keys to generate those accounts again.

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 don’t know that it is “tangibly better for privacy”. Not saying it isn’t, just that I don’t know. It’s definitely better for anonymity/pseudonymity. The main benefits, in my opinion, are:

1. No phone number needed for sign-up. Signal wants people to be able to easily find who is available to message on Signal, and they’re leveraging the phone numbers in your personal contacts to build a private “social graph”. This is actually really nice, but also can be a huge hurdle for a variety of reasons I won’t go into, none of which are privacy, as others have repeatedly alleged, because there is nothing connected to your phone number, as Signal has demonstrated in their public subpoena responses.

2. SimpleX let’s you have multiple profiles. For example, a work profile, a personal profile, a public/social profile, and an anonymous/pseudonymous profile. They also support business profiles. This is, in my opinion, a huge problem for Signal. Sometimes Signal is used to do things like organize protests. If that group is public, anyone can join and see exactly who you are, and you’re essentially doxing yourself in that group. Really not ideal. In the case of something like Session, I can use Shelter to create a work profile and install a redundant copy of the app for another profile, but due to #1, this is not possible.

I also see orgs like EFF and 404 Media using Signal as a comms method. You can’t message them either without doxxing yourself, unless you just erase/pseudonymize your profile, which would then just completely confuse your actual friends and family.

3. No one can message you that you have not invited to message you. Due to #1 (again) people can and do use Signal to send spam/scam messages. Now they could do so just using SMS, but my personal SMS app has spam filters, Signal does not.

If you want to create a public invitation, you can do so, and share it wherever you want. I share mine on my personal Linkstack site. If, in some hypothetical future, spammers/scammers start scraping the web for invitations, and that invitation gets collected and sold/shared, I can simply rotate it out with a new invitation, but, importantly, without losing any of the connections to people I’ve already messaged. You can do similar with Signal usernames, but only for the 1 profile, and you cannot stop people from messaging with your #. You can also set it in a group to disallow private messages to other members, which is a huge problem in places like Discord and Matrix.

This doesn’t really matter so much today, as certainly the # of users are so small as to be a waste of time for any spammers, but it matters so much on a fundamental level, in a hypothetical future where it becomes widely adopted.

You can also create 1-time invitations so that you can be 100% sure that the person messaging you is the person you invited, as opposed to Signal’s “safety number” approach.

4. They don’t use Google/Apple notifications. This is both a pro and con. Ideally they would just support UnifiedPush but instead they run their own notification server. This hits your battery life, as well as causes problems with notifications. I often open the app and just watch it update messages for several seconds and then get a wave of notifications, but I also don’t utilize the “always on” notification service. The fact that Signal just uses Google/Apple is appalling but you can get around it using the FOSS Molly app. To reiterate, there is no way to receive notifications in the Signal mobile app without going through Google/Apple’s servers. It really chaps my ass to see supposed “private” apps that make no option available to circumvent the servers of tech oligopolies. I understand very few people would utilize this but I still think it’s extremely important, and the fact that Molly devs actually provide this shows that it’s entirely feasible. Google FCM notifications is the only remaining reason I absolutely need Google Play Services installed on my device, and it frustrates me to no end.

I played with it briefly. It looks like a good choice for a situation where security is paramount and the people involved are reasonably motivated. I don’t have those needs, and nobody I know has asked to connect with me using it.

Signal, on the other hand is a familiar experience for most people with no new concepts to learn, and popular enough that I think most people will find a number of contacts already using it.

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.

Tl dr It sucks IMO