Here’s mine. I haven’t used half of these but I still think I made a pretty good one.
Here’s the website to make one: https://tiermaker.com/create/ultimate-instant-messenger-tier-list-16684822-2
Revisions:
iMessage maybe F tier because it’s backdoored-by-default ™. Even WhatsApp doesn’t back up your chats so WhatsApp can read them by default. You can go to backup settings and then choose to back up and E2EE is not checked by default but you get to choose on the first backup. When you set up an iPhone, iMessage backs up to iCloud with ADB disabled by default.
I’m not sure if Google Messages is backed up in a non-E2EE fashion by default.
No XMPP/Conversations?
One thing often not mentioned in these rankings is multi-device and PC usage. Not just multiplatform, but also integration, like system tray and resources needed. Is there any messenger smaller than 1GB with all the dependencies, using less than 300MB of RAM for nothing, and often going above 1GB?
XMPP isn’t truly private because it generates a significant amount of metadata. The server you’re on posses a list of your contacts (roster) and rooms your in.
The TLDR is that you should stick to the recommendations on the site; those options were hand-picked for specific reasons, usually forward secrecy and limited metadata leaks, as well as public audits.
It is also worth noting that these platforms are not all apples-to-apples comparisons. For instance, Discord, Teams, Telegram, and Matrix are capable of hosting significantly larger rooms with more people, making them much more suitable for large communities. Out of these, Matrix is perhaps the most notable exception: it does not require a phone number,
is federated (meaning not run by a single tech company) and has E2EE on DMs, unlike the others it enforces end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on direct messages by default.
Delta Chat uses standard email protocols (IMAP/SMTP) that naturally leak massive amounts of metadata, trying to force them into functioning like a modern chat application. It relies on OpenPGP, it lacks forward secrecy. If your private key is ever compromised, any historically intercepted messages can be completely decrypted. Because it requires a dedicated client program and account to be usable anyway, you are significantly better off installing a platform that was actually built for secure chat from the ground up rather than relying on email infrastructure.
Unless you’re aware of something I’m not, from what I understand, most of the metadata is actually encrypted at this point. The main thing that’s missing compared to something like Signal is Sealed Sender.
Supposedly the forward secrecy issues will be solved soonish when they add support for Autocrypt v2. It still won’t have post-compromise security though.
I’ll also note that I have no idea what the current status is regarding adding support.
Can’t you solve it by hosting your own XMPP server, which is fairly easy? Or is the point that these recommendations are meant for the general, non-self-hosting public? Because, frankly, I’d pick XMPP 1000 times over Matrix.
Thank you for this, really looking forward to some proper analysis of Jami, which sounds very interesting to me.
They say the To, From is not and it won’t ever be, because it’s email and used for routing. That will never be E2EE.
If it’s your own server and you trust it implicitly, but if someone joins a group chat your server will be exposed. Old post but still relevant.
For a server of like under 10 people there’s not much reason to not just use a signal group chat, least then you have high availability for free.
The “From” field will be when/if they finally implement a Sealed Sender equivalent. The “To” field likely will never be, but frankly that shouldn’t be surprising since if the server never knows who you’re sending your message to, there’s no way for it to route it properly. This isn’t a problem exclusive to email.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. There’s a dozen other reasons not to use it, like the fact that because its email it uses mime encoding which is notoriously inefficient for storing things like photos.
Watching the original development of that it seemed as they started trying to make it all about email, then as features were added things got more specific. As a result it’s a salad of other standards rather than one cohesive project.
What’s the little bird in S tier?
my guess
It’s a pigeon. I suppose this refers to carrier pigeons 
I think we should also make [Privacy oriented] Android OSes (famously known as “ROMs”) tier list next, ill be working on it…
Linux and laptop/desktop oses already exist around so yeah
Thanks for the video. It looks like it’s very hard to rank messengers this way, because you can’t evaluate one without its common usage context. After watching I thought it couldn’t be done better.
Like putting Discord over Telegram doesn’t make much sense from a pure software perspective. But it makes a lot of sense pragmatically: nobody uses Discord for secure one-to-one chats, while Telegram users sadly do. And vice versa — if you use Telegram only for group chats (as it’s used in some spaces: crypto, dev, etc), it’s probably in the same tier as Discord
It’s hard to rank anything this way (linearly) which is why tier lists are stupid videos lol
or just maybe this is exactly we need a plus and minus rankings like LTT does to help with linear ranking even a little
In that I have created the tier list I promised (yes there’s honestly that very little of options unless we include Linux based)
(to help with: Comparison of Android-based Operating Systems)
my take:
add a m tier for meta
also whats the snowflake one at the top
Where would MeshCore and Reticulum fall?
Here is my tierlist:
(Its a screenshot because I can’t download the image with Tor browser)
Explanation
SimpleX: Is on top because its the only messenger I know that tries its best to avoid user identifier, which makes it the king of private messaging.
Session: Is the only fully decentralized messenger that is reliable (as far as I know)
Signal: Is good but requires phone numbers and is fully centralized.
I put many apps not in my tierlist because I dont know enough about them to rate them.