I remember loads of people used to have this but I’ve never met a single person who has heard of Session, SimpleX or another anon alternative.
What did Wickr do differently
I personally wouldn’t even consider Session an option, they have too many questionable decisions and issues one example being Don’t Use Session (Signal Fork) - Dhole Moments .
SimpleX is mainly just UX, it’s not as usable as something like Signal. I can’t place my finger on it but it just feels weird to use.
This is barely considering “normies”
Wickr was never anonymous. Yes you could register without your phone number, but the client did nothing to prevent your IP address from ending up in the servers. (Same goes for SimpleX).
Wickr was also proprietary so it’s E2EE was never trustworthy: you had no way to check for backdoors outside very tedious reverse engineering.
What they got right was marketing, and there was a bunch of people using it to buy hard drugs. I saw it on dark web forums, others saw it too Wickr Me is shutting down December 31, 2023 | Hacker News
The actually anonymous messengers like Cwtch, Ricochet Refresh, Onion share chats and Quiet suffer from P2P messengers’ architectural limitations, like
- no offline messages,
- no iPhone support due to apple not allowing process forking for Tor,
- higher battery drain,
- low bandwidth and higher latency for communication,
- slow file transfers, and
- poor (video) call performance.
Pair that with less than polished UI and UX and it’s no wonder normies won’t jump out of joy to use them.
Yeah it didn’t do anything in the way of IP protection but I mean anon in the sense of not needing a phone number. No one uses messengers like this anymore at all. Signal has replaced that, and it is of course far superior, but for the average person who isn’t using crypto rented phone numbers or something, it’s not anonymous.
It was definitely not a state of the art messenger, but it was not KYC’d in the same way as messengers today, and it was ACTUALLY used.
The real limitation for those messengers you mentioned like Cwtch and Onion Share is that they are not at all normie friendly. I would LOVE if everyone used them, but we just don’t live in a world where normies are gonna be able to adopt that.
Centralized services have a much easier time at providing a reliable, feature-rich, and user-friendly service as it’s what the internet and computers were built to run. Developers and users aren’t burdened with the complexities of creating and using a (comparatively crude or purpose-specific) decentralized network within a centralized tech world.
Since anonymous messengers are especially prone to various forms of abuse, we can expect services like Wickr to shut down or devolve. They either need anti-abuse mechanisms which identify or cost their users (such as Signal’s registration requirements) or they need to decentralize as SimpleX and Cwtch have. We can only hope that decentralized alternatives gradually improve on their usability and features.
Its not the best UX but it works and does its job.
I also use it to transfer small data between devices
Why not just use Signal?
This thread is about anonymous messengers.
Aren’t Matrix (Element x) and Briar both anonymous messengers?
It does work yes but if we want more “normies” to use, at least in my experience any sort of friction makes it extremely hard to keep them using it if they weren’t already.
Yeah, it’s kind of useful to make little notes. I don’t know why but I really like a messaging app style for making quick notes.
Phone number free messengers still exist, they just never got Wickr’s enterprise distribution. Threema is the one I can actually get less technical friends onto for a one time license. Session and SimpleX stay niche for the UX reasons people already covered here.
I keep a short comparison of the ones I actually buy or use when I need a channel that is not tied to a SIM:
Not a daily Signal replacement. More the backup when someone refuses to hand over a number at all.