My security minded brethren.. What’s the most secure, Signal, Wickr, or others?
There’re a lot of misinformation out there but help me shady in peace lol.

Keybase

Signal has the best compromise for security and usability.

Only heard of signal. If @linuxxx is using it Im pretty sure it's safe to use

I think Wire: like Signal, but even the server stuff is open source

Wasn’t there some sort of requirement for one of them to hand the keys over to the powers that be? Need to do more research but you hear stories and although I don’t wear a Tin hat it’s nice to be able to trust the service.
I’ll look into those others mentioned here.

@RantSomeWhere Definitely have no interest in using telegram lol.

@RantSomeWhere Expecting that politicians know what they are talking about? 😅

@RantSomeWhere He didn't directly demand it from Signal, but even proposed it as a law.

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If you want good security, but you want choose (or even selfhost) your own server, you can try XMPP (popular clients are Conversations for Android and Gajim for Desktop; both are FLOSS).

Alternarively, a more modern protocol is Matrix, the most popular client for Android is Riot.im (so FLOSS). You can host or at least choose your own server, too.

A total alternative is Briar, either communication over local networks, or over Tor by hosting a hidden service on the phone itself. It can also add background "noise" to hide message metadata.

The easiest messenger is Signal: A central server, your identity is linked with your phone number (like WhatsApp).

A relatively popular choice in the DACH (Germaany, Austria, Switzerland) region is Threema, but it's closed source and costs a few euros.

XMPP, Matrix and Signal use the the same underlying encryption protocol (known as "OMEMO" [XMPP], "Olm" [Matrix], "Double Ratchet" or just "Signal Protocol") by Moxie Marlinspike, the author of signal. For XMPP can also use the older OTR or even PGP for encryption, depending on the clients.
Even WhatsApp adopted the Signal Protocol.
Briar uses Tor's encryption and Threema uses NaCl.

@sbiewald this is awesome info, thanks!
I wasn’t too keen on signal because it’s linked to your number.

@Codex404 @stop IMO stop is right. When you see what signal actually does as for metadata protection, that's just fucking amazing.

Requirement for any encrypted messenger to be called secure: it has to be open source.