RetroShare vs Riot vs Ricochet vs Tor Messenger vs CoyIM vs Signal-Desktop vs Pidgin

I would like to open a discussion about the chat clients mentioned below, with regards to security, privacy, and anonymity, and setting them up in Whonix Workstation (13 and/or 14).

  1. RetroShare
  2. Riot
  3. Ricochet
  4. Tor Messenger
  5. CoyIM
  6. Signal (desktop)
  7. Pidgin
  8. uTox/Toxic/Toxygen
1 Like

Gajim + OMEMO is pretty good way to go for now.
One can use it to talk with people on every platform around. If they don’t have OMEMO, one can use PGP or OTR.

If one have control of .onion jabber server, security is OK.

Ew

RetroShare developers are planning a thing called RetroTor, which will bundle Tor by default for unexperienced users.

i2p would have been a better option

Probably it would be technically harder, since vanilla i2p is java software, while RetroShare is C++

Kovri is C++

i2pd (I2P Daemon) is a full-featured C++ implementation of I2P client

This discussion didn’t go very far. I’m specifically curious about comparisons between XMPP (say with CoyIM + OTR or Gajim + OMEMO) and Riot / Matrix.

Didn’t see Riot mentioned at all in

coyim now is the default client for xmpp in whonix.

very horrible , Riot electron/JS based. Matrix doesnt implement auto-encryption… so bad for anonymity.

Tox chat hope it will be added to whonix 15, very great tool.

I see they have a desktop/linux version. But the apt package is called “riot-web”. JS-based as well?

To clarify - personally I also prefer to use XMPP. However sometimes the other party uses something else and I want to assess the risks.

there is no debian package for riot. But even if there will be one then yes it is a JS based.