Even better is Wire: no phone number required, doesn't access your contacts, free personal accounts available, you can use it on a desktop machine with nothing more than a web browser, when using an installed app you can be logged into three Wire accounts at the same time, source code is open source and has been audited for security, you can set up your own locally hosted (or in your own cloud)... and more I'm probably forgetting.
The fact that it's a "secure collaboration platform" means it doesn't fill the same niche. I don't need a secure collaboration platform to talk with my family or friends.
I'd just like to mention that Matrix (and its most prominent client "Element") sounds similar:
> Even better is Wire: no phone number required, doesn't access your contacts, free personal accounts available, you can use it on a desktop machine with nothing more than a web browser
Same
> when using an installed app you can be logged into three Wire accounts at the same time
Don't know if that's possible with one of the currently existing Matrix-clients. I guess that maybe in the future that would be possible, respectively, doesn't sound too difficult to implement.
> is open source and has been audited for security, you can set up your own locally hosted (or in your own cloud)
Same for Matrix. Not sure about the official audit, but at least France decided to use it as a base for its own governmental chat ( https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed... ) so I guess/hope that they audited the original software.
Thank you for mention this! I don't know why Wire is not mentioned in thread like this. It is best without meta data collection (such as phone number). You can register with just an email and it is based on the encryption protocol that Signal uses. On top of that, the server is written in Haskell!!! Yes, Signal server is in Java, btw. Which is not bad. And Wire is based in Switzerland, with GDPR in Europe it has better data privacy jurisdictions.
