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…

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…

xmpp + omemo. Signal is centralized, matrix leaks tons of metadata to sync between services…

I believe they are claiming that with the new discoveries it’s pointless to keep trying. Whether that’s shared with other devs or not probably won’t affect their decision:

These three bugs basically ruin the whole point of arkenfox: // sec bugs: offscreencanvas / preconnect / cookie_exceptions

I’m not that familiar with them, but sounds like there’s no way to keep a sane balance between usability and privacy, and clearly upstream doesn’t help a bit, it’s like following the Borg advice “resistance is futile”. Battling the privacy fight is not an easy fight I guess. The only hope for those who are non experts as the arkenfox guys is that phoenix keeps up the good work. Overall I pretty much prefer arkenfox over phoenix, but fortunately Librewolf is neither arkenfox nor phoenix, even though they are discussing if they are better based of phoenix the are different projects making different decisions…

I wish frozen fennec didn’t die on the attempt, :( The current option is ironfox on LOS/AOSP based/…, and I don’t agree with several of their decisions. The amount of filter lists is so stubbornly huge, that there’s no time to deselect and/or remove them on low end phones for example, and the whole thing just slow things down. And I know it’s picky but I really like decisions like taking bad things off from build time if possible, even if they are opt-in… Any ways, to me it’s sad to see them closing the project, but I’m also hopeful some others as expert as they were on several of the topics they dealt with will fill up some of the the hole when they stop…

How about isync + notmuch + afew + alot + msmtp? gpg decryption not directly supported but using alot’s pipeto it can be used to decrypt messages. As using notmuch as indexer it’s flow is pretty similar/compatible to/with gmail.