I think your review isn't that far off. But looking at your other comments you kind of mix requirements all over. For example your beef with WhatsApp is Facebook owns the metadata, but when someone says Wire you say it's too hard to self host. But somehow SMS is fine.

I think you need to separate them by requirements. But anyway for all purposes Moxy and tptacek keep touting Wire is way better.

- It's not tired to a phone number, but can be if you want to. Meaning finding connections is just as easy.

- it uses signals encryption

- it's message delivery is better than signals

- It's UI and UX is a million times better than signals. I let my mom use it years ago already. And you looking pretty actually matters to a lot of people.

- The Desktop messaging usecase is properly addressed even for a business setting. Signal feels like a crappy SMS client for desktop on desktop

I have no idea why these two people write the things the way they do, but unfortunately its looking less like a let's get people to use the best solutions and more like smear pieces for everything that is not signal. It's really too bad.

BTW signal as a messaging client when you frequently switch countries is such a horrible citizen on my phone and judging from peoples issues I'm not the only one who has that problem.

- If you have multiple sim cards god knows what you cannot just reply to messages since it will just send from the wrong one.

- If you're in an country with a sim that doesn't send the country code with system messages and it differs from your signal number the country will be detected wrong. Replying might cost you. Everytime I upgrade signal I kinda hope it's fixed, but they might as well just put a wontfix label on it.

You're right I never stated my requirements anywhere. Ideally I would want something that:

- works (with push notifs and instant delivery and file transfer)

- is secure (ideally E2EE that's established and maintained, if I control the server just TLS might suffice although it's probably still safer to push trust to the edge)

- is Free/Open Source all the way through

- is self-hostable in a managable way (I have some but not a lot of knowledge in running and administering services and I'd rather not shoot myself in the foot with something extremely complicated.) Bonus points if there's service offerings I can fall back to.

- isn't bound to phones or phone numbers

SMS doesn't fulfill these requirements, I simply use it because it's the "universe default" in terms of instant messaging. And I assume telcoms are so regulated that they technically could but legally aren't allowed to spy on me. For that I had a glance at my national telcom laws and while I'm not a lawyer it certainly sounded like they aren't allowed to spy on me unless I'm already in legal trouble.

I send an SMS every few months, the vast majority of my messaging happens through Signal or iMessage.

And yeah, Signal isn't exceptionally reliable, I've had messages go missing for hours and even days. I hope it gets better, I'm willing to put up with it for security's sake.

I'm not sure I understand what SMS can do that Signal can't, the difference can't possibly be that Signal requires a phone number, can it? And SMS does nothing to indicate delivery and used to lose my messages all the time back when I relied on it.

SMS works fine for me for some reason. You're right in that it's really bad though. I use it because it's the only thing that even really works at the moment but I wanna get off it as soon as possible.

Oh, right, Keybase. How did I forget Keybase?

Don't use it as much as the others because of network effects, but it works just fine. Requires a user account but no phone number.

Keybase might be worth a look. The only complaint I have is that there seems to be no way to self-host it (which is an option I'd like to have.) And the server source seems to be hidden from public which is not great for trust.

The network effect doesn't really concern me. For communication with strangers I'll have to fall back to email anyways since WhatsApp is virtually the only thing that has presence in my area.

It's true that as things stand you're pretty much stuck with Keybase the company.

But they're going to some lengths to make sure it doesn't stay that way:

https://keybase.io/docs/client/client_architecture

I'm bullish on Keybase, even after the obnoxious Stellar Lumen airdrop fiasco. It seems like they're doing most things right.

Telegram Wire

What about those?

Telegram is a joke. They roll their own encryption, screwed it up massively on Day 1 in exactly the ways that everyone who says "don't roll your own encryption" predicted they would [0], and make snake-oil claims about their security while responding to legitimate technical criticism with conspiracy theories about how their intelocutors are all agents of the U.S. government.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948742

Telegram requires a phone number and the server code is completely hidden away from you which does not exactly evoke trust.

Wire might be a good contender. However, last time I looked at it I wanted to stick with options I could confidently self-host and Wire looks way too complicated on that end. (The recommended way to do it is over Kubernetes which is something I don't wanna touch in production.)