Link: https://simplex.chat/

Those who use the SimpleX application, I would like to know if there are communities or privacy groups, the truth is Lemmy is my only social platform, a few years ago I closed everything I had to finally stop being part of the herd, or if possible.

https://simplex.chat/

There are a bunch of public groups.
They even have an official directory.
Due to the nature of the platform, privacy is a common theme for many of them.

awesome idea, but the onboarding needs to be heavily simplified if the aim is mass adoption

it’s quite clever but its UI is not that comfortable to use, non tech-savvy people will struggle a lot with it

I never got over how the name reminds me of herpes simplex virus 🤣

Would like it more than Signal ideally. But it's hard enough already to get people over to Signal. Couldn't justify how much battery its notification service drained for the few contacts (all nerdy close friends) I had there. That was over a year ago so I'm interested to hear if they fixed the power consumption issue.

“Simplex… it’ll grow on you.”

I use it but only for my immediate family. We visit places that have WiFi but no cellphone reception. So it comes in handy. It can do video and audio calls.

Yes, there are privacy groups of different kinds.
Try it, it's not as hard as some people say, the onboarding and interface has been refined.

Look for "Simplex directory" and search there for groups.

It's easy. You simply exchange addresses or one time links. I made a group and added all my family members to it. Here I am talking to my wife who loves talking with me for no reason at all:

As you can see you can send images and I think video and files. I haven't tried those things yet, just images.

The only sad thing is that it's centralized, kind of signal but better.

On the privacy front I believe xmpp + omemo shines, and jami is also very interesting (though jami for some reason is doing efforts to allow LLMs agents and bots, through plugins of course not by default, but I don't see the need of any of that stuff on something like jami). Sadly briar is on maintain mode and it was really bad on phones' batteries, tox never took of leaving only jami like a viable distributed alternative. xmpp is decentralized and federated, doing pretty well with omemo...

Wym? Its decentralized bc everybody can Host their own relay, Like Delta chat

I dont use it because of the lack of moderatoon tools for groups.

Also main groups are filled with transphobes and fascists, with moderators there doing nothing.

AFAIK you can can discover public channels through their channel directory.

Yes, but there were three gotchas that make it difficult to use for our purposes - one is that you have to have your phone on and connected if you want to use the same account on another device. Given I use my phone as much like a dumb phone as possible and turn data off when I don't need it (aka most of the time) it's impractical to use. We kinda got around this by having different accounts for different devices bit it left you guessing which account to contact someone on because you don't know if they're on their phone, laptop, PC, etc.

It uses a a chunk of battery and the devs seem completely disinterested in UnifiedPush.

A lesser but helpful feature that's lacking is web chat. It's a lot easier to get family and friends sold on alternate chat clients if they can try it out using a web browser they already have instead of installing yet another app.

I think I gave it up because of missing typing indicator. A very small thing. And maybe I also had problem with Video.

They have not. I checked again recently. And they're still somewhat hostile towards the idea of UnifiedPush

It's tied to jack dorsey so I just can't trust it tbh

You're right, I forgot, in that regard for example with xmpp, besides being able to self-host you have multiple services, perhaps eventually there might be non just simpleX services but hosted by others as well, though it seems whether simpleX or self-host for now. So it's true it's decentralized by definition, perhaps not so much in practice though.

There's another sad thing I just remember, it doesn't yet support multi-divice syncing, and the alternative is to create groups with different members, one per device, and then in the same group apply the same for all other multi-device members. The reaction so far from the devs is that it's not so important having a workaround at hand. So both things made me drop my trials with simpleX...

Well regarding the Hosting Part I have Seen one Provider that is Not affiliated with simplex Host a relay Which I personally use and is what got me interested in simplex but idk about other relays so your point about practically Not many Independent Relays existing is prolly fair

I'm curious why you would be interested in public groups on Simplex? Its great for direct messages and small friend/invite only groups. But what would you gain in terms of privacy with public groups? If the challenge to entry is "click this public invite link", you should assume bots are joining and scraping anything with triple digit member counts. If your threat model is focused on corporate surveillance, public group chats aren't that much different than community forums that lack a bot friendly API for scraping. Which is to say, very easy to scrape still if anyone actually cares to.

As others have mentioned, the moderation tools are basically nonexistent and bigotry runs rampant. Even if you try to organize alternative groups to the Nazi bars, you will not have any tools to stop organized harassment.

First I've heard of this. Source?

https://simplex.chat/blog/20240814-simplex-chat-vision-funding-v6-private-routing-new-user-experience.html

People really need to chill about who invests on what and who donates to whom. Those actions are not equal to having control or even fully agreeing to anything.

Jack Dorsey invested via an investment firm, it's not like he bought the brand or project or anything of the sort.

I thank everyone for their comments, they clarified things that I didn't even know about it, and nuances of why it is not always such a good idea to use the app in certain situations. I also laughed with some who made jokes in a very polite way, infinite thanks to everyone!

Fair enough

SimpleX is an encrypted instant messaging app, it's not designed as a social network or a forum.

Large group members often suffer from unreceiving some messages, due to group encryption complexity. It's almost like the famous "unable to decrypt message" in Matrix. Maybe one can create an unencrypted group, but then it makes no sense to use SimpleX.

This is a trade-off of privacy. SimpleX relays don't store messages after they are received, it's all stored locally on your device. Like with Delta Chat, in order to sync two devices you have to migrate the local database.