Polaroids Of Nothing Much.

The fact that you see this rhetoric of “telegram is the Facebook Messenger of [evildoers]” on both the left and the right should tip you off it is not a partisan or factional issue. Everyone willing to employ surveillance and censorship will treat e2e encryption as the tool of the enemy bc they can’t aspire to control it

Telegram has the option to encrypt communication but it's closed source, and generally not considered to be a good choice for security.

Matrix is a protocol for integrating a ton of different chat platforms via federated servers, also open source. The encryption seems fine, it's based on Signal's mechanism, but it's not as heavily audited as Signal, it's more intended as a generic chat competitor than a secure chat app so while you could do much worse it's not where I'd go first. In particular one thing Matrix does that you may not like is bridging, linking a matrix room to an external chat service. While this is isn't a huge concern, it means that Matrix rooms might be mirrored to or from a less secure service.

Element is a matrix protocol client, so it'll do everything matrix does. There's other matrix clients of varying quality, I haven't checked in on Matrix in years but last time I was there the client situation was pretty dire, Element looks like a significant improvement usability wise but I won't say more.

I used to use Tox, and that uses a well-audited encryption library called libsodium for high security peer-to-peer communication, so as long as you trust your first peer (who you could set manually) you're mostly good. libsodium is widely used and well audited, but very few people use Tox so it doesn't have as many eyes on it as you might prefer.

You can look for security audits of communication software by security experts you trust, places like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are typically a reliable source which cares about encryption, this is their anti-surveillance tool help page, and you can check the blogs of people who work for them

It's important to remember is that Tor is not just for avoiding government surveillance, but is also a good tool to protect your identity from non-state actors.

If you are, for instance, creating an account on White Date to flirt with fascists and try to figure out if they're cops or active duty military, it is probably best to ensure that your traffic to the site is anonymized.

If you are, for instance, pirating textbooks on your school network, it is probably best to anonymize the endpoint of that traffic.

If you are, for instance, the parent of a teen in Texas researching how to provide them gender affirming care, you might want to anonymize your traffic.

CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT HOW PRETTY THESE ARE?