TLDR: Avoid Telegram and WhatsApp. Recommended messengers are Session, Signal, SimpleX and Threema. Honorable mention: Briar.

Another basic thing -- If your messenger is throwing your messages in a notification; it's being logged. Google was found to be logging almost all notification content. Make sure your message app isn't putting the content of messages into notifications.

What I like about Matrix so much is that it can be run fully on your own infrastructure, even the TURN server for VOIP, and you can build the clients from source yourself too.

But I agree that it's quite difficult to use. And until now only my dad and my spouse use it with me because they love me and trust me. But they both always have problems with their clients. It randomly logs out and then they have to login with the password and with the encryption key again. For a long time calling didn't work because I misconfigured the server. Then videos were for the longest time uploaded in full size and anything longer than a few seconds would be rejected. The whole spaces thing is implemented very weirdly so it confuses them. And then the threads are even worse so we can't use them because nobody gets how to do it.

XMPP, for example, does not enable end-to-end encryption by default

Why always these false myths? The most popular XMPP mobile clients do enable it by default.

Matrix doesn’t offer disappearing messages (which I consider important for digital minimalism and cybersecurity.

I noticed this in the article and figured I'd throw my 2 cents in. This might be a spicy take, but I actually can't stand apps that do this.

When I was in school I had someone harass me online with threats of violence (they spent a couple of hours insulting and threatening me) then lie to the staff that I was harassing them with even more extreme shit. The staff and other students all took their side until I logged in and showed the conversation. If the messages had disappeared I wouldn't have been able to prove my innocence.

I very firmly want encrypted communications for privacy (I use Signal and Matrix), but I am quite wary of purging communications automatically. That said, it's anyone's right to use services that auto delete and my right not to.

I'm curious what other people's take on this would be.

Why do people like Matrix? It's really slow. Even most of the non-Electron clients consume a ton of resources (even more than Electron apps usually do).

Especially Gomuks, by far the worst offender. It consumes nearly a gigabyte of memory and it's a TUI.

SimpleX is currently my favourite. Yeah, there are some small concerns, but where aren't they? I hope SimpleX can grow more popular and I'm also waiting for a full-featured desktop client, so it'll be easier to convince people to switch.

encrypted email

Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it's probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

• Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there's an "envelope" containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can't be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn't know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
• There's no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
• While not an issue with the protocol itself, it's the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don't stop there of course :p).
• Another thing is the fact that it's incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren't. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
• PGP is... peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don't think that's quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

This isn't to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It's just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn't nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I've been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn't much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.

I like Signal, but I really miss multi device support. Same issue with Threema.

As always, the problem isnt using a new service or super secure app, the problem is making everyone else I talk to use said app, not happening anytime soon sadly.

Sad that Wire wasn't mentioned. I think its the only one that encrypts everything, allows anonymous accounts (no phone number needed!), and has independent clients on all platforms (no mobile app install required, but they have one) that seamlessly syncs messages on all clients

Oh, and its free and open-source.

As a long time user of Session, it is hard to believe someone would describe it as "user-friendly".

We've been on simplex for a few months, I like it quite a bit. We made diff accounts for each device and added them all to a group.

Notifications arrive reliably on graphene (no google services), and KDE connect.

I don't love the desktop client and wish I could change text size and scaling. I was able to message the dev about it in simplex and got replies which was cool