I advise Signal (for privacy and security, not anonymity) and Telegram (for privacy and anonymity, not security).
I discussed this little bit in my 2020 overview of privacy community writeup https://lemmy.ml/post/44291 . Quoting the bad section, point 2:
Anonymity means protection of your real life identity, and its separation from your alias in real and/or virtual world.
People that criticise Signal messenger for not having anonymity never understand its purpose. It was made as a WhatsApp competitor, not an XMPP or Matrix competitor.
Telegram and Signal serve as excellent examples to explain this. While Signal has a telephone number requirement, it assures full privacy and security between the sender and receiver of a chat. On the other hand, Telegram does ask for phone number but then you set your alias, hide your phone number and achieve anonymity from every public recipient in the future, thus being popular among protestors and dissidents. Burner numbers exist. Telegram though only has optional, less secure and less audited E2EE, not by default thus not being a perfectly secure tool while being private and anonymous.
To add though, Signal is working on usernames which will also make it suitable for anonymity.
Nice answer. Yeah this is essentially where I’ve landed. I really like XMPP, but it’s a big ask to get a bunch of non-tech friends to get an account somewhere they / I can trust.
The fact that Telegram is available through F-Droid is also a bonus. I really don’t like having to use the Play Store to get an app.
So Telegram, despite not being fully open and not E2E by default is at least a decent second to Signal. Good to know.
I advise Signal (for privacy and security, not anonymity) and Telegram (for privacy and anonymity, not security).
I discussed this little bit in my 2020 overview of privacy community writeup https://lemmy.ml/post/44291 . Quoting the bad section, point 2:
To add though, Signal is working on usernames which will also make it suitable for anonymity.
Nice answer. Yeah this is essentially where I’ve landed. I really like XMPP, but it’s a big ask to get a bunch of non-tech friends to get an account somewhere they / I can trust.
The fact that Telegram is available through F-Droid is also a bonus. I really don’t like having to use the Play Store to get an app.
Apparently, they are coming in 2021