Threema messenger is open source as of today

[Rik]

No signal does not allow federating

[Herve5]

@Rik Sorry, I was answering your question “Does the app automatically find people in your addressbook who also have…”
Yes Signal does this for other Signal users, and they manage to do so without themselves knowing any phone number -through a strategy I spent a great time analyzing, but it definitely convinced me.

As concerns federating, I don’t understand the point actually. To me federating means connecting various central servers (federating them), but neither Signal nor Jami have central servers.

[Rik]

Is signal distributed like Jami? I didn’t know that. Still the question remains the same, both for user app and servers (if there are any): if some other organisation builds a fork, what is the federation policy? Signal does not allow this

[Herve5]

I don’t know what exactly you mean by “distributed”. I suppose if someone forks it there will still remain a single place expected for the server like today, and they’ll need to negotiate with the original Signal to maybe share or exchange info. That’s why in my (minimal) understanding, Signal is not Jami. For me, only Jami just lives without requiring any central server.

[tyxo]

@Herve5

I don’t know what exactly you mean by “distributed”.

I guess here refers to the aspect that you can chose the server you want to use for communication.
For example: jitsi, nextcloud talk, Delta Chat, all Matrix messengers and so on give you the freedom to chose which server you use. This can be your own private hosted, one by the community that fits your needs (e.g. distroot.org) or a commercial server. If I am getting it right, the signal and telegram servers are in different countries but still owned by the corresponding entities.

[Rik]

@tyxo

I guess here refers to the aspect that you can chose the server you want to use for communication.
For example: jitsi, nextcloud talk, Delta Chat, all Matrix messengers and so on give you the freedom to chose which server you use. This can be your own private hosted, one by the community that fits your needs (e.g. distroot.org) or a commercial server. If I am getting it right, the signal and telegram servers are in different countries but still owned by the corresponding entities.

this is what federated means, indeed. Sounds like Signal is not distributed, if there is a single server (distributed means there are none, like with Jami I think)

[Snowest]

With Threema, you can do encrypted backup to any server like nextcloud!

[kalman]

Signal used to have the option to get federated but Moxie decided that it is bad for development.

It’s good that Threema opensourced the client but it looks to me that it’s now the same as Telegram. Both have closed sourced servers. Threema is still one of the better options for a messenger.