a good alternative to protonmail for secure encrypted email communication is Delta Chat: https://delta.chat/

Delta Chat was one of the FOSS projects affected: https://chaos.social/@delta/114211300446944585

This sucks, at least Tesla was electric, fuck cars...

Meanwhile me not giving a F about this news because I use CalyxOS and the feature to auto-restart the phone on inactivity with fine customizable time and not a fixed 3 days exist since a long time already there

It is easy to disable, just follow this basic steps:

1. uninstall WhatsApp
2. install and use Delta Chat
3. Enjoy 🎉

Even Gmail allows to use the email client of your choice, going for an email provider that force you to use their app is a bummer

There are a lot of reasons for each of those will try to provide some at a glance:

SimpleX, XMPP, Matrix: The client is more user friendly, less buggy and less "this is for nerds" UI than the clients of those networks, ArcaneChat is more on the WhatsApp-like UI

Signal is centralized, depends on phone numbers so can't be used by children in the family that don't have access to SIM card yet etc. Registering in Signal is also more complicated, SMS verification, solving captcha etc. No good multi-account and multi-device as ArcaneChat.

Groups in ArcaneChat are managed independent of the server while in XMPP they are created on a given server and if the server dies the group is lost, while in matrix a lot of group state is replicated and tracked by the servers, in XMPP is easy to end up with unencrypted groups and in Matrix you often get "unable to decrypt" and emoji reaction are not even encrypted, ArcaneChat groups are always encrypted and safe against MITM (green checkmark displayed in the group name)

ArcaneChat has in-chat mini-apps that work independent of any server, communication is only between chat members and e2e encrypted, for example collaborative editor in chat, shopping list, split bill app, several mini games with shared scoreboards etc.

ArcaneChat works offline-first unlike many(all?) of the previous mentioned apps you can even create groups while being offline use and modify the in-chat apps and all state will be synchronized when you are back online. The app also works in slow and unstable connectivity when most of the other mentioned apps would simply not manage to connect.

Yes

btw, Matrix server requirements are much higher, and the client apps are less user-friendly

For example, arcanechat.me server has more than 1400 users and the server is using around 800MB of RAM, CPU is idle most of the time or really low usage, less than 3GB of disk (including whole Debian operative system etc)

Yes and no, it allows to login without providing any data or using any email account, in that case a random/anonymous account is created in arcanechat.me which is an email internally but optimized for chatting with similar speeds of other chatting platforms

Also with arcanechat.me server unencrypted messages are not allowed at all so you can be sure you don't accidentally leak any message, also all messages are removed from the server immediately after downloading them (or after a few days when using multiple devices)

no, there is no important metadata leaked via headers, the only obvious data the server knows is the same as on Matrix and XMPP, when you tell the server to deliver the message to a given user, the server hence knows that X sent a message to Y, but since accounts are randomly generated email addresses without any personal data tied, this is more secure than Signal where phone numbers are collected by a central server and if they wanted to they can match your IP to your phone number even if you use sealed sender to send it is obvious who you are by your IP and timing since you also connect to the server non-anonymously to receive messages

the app is much more on the WhatsApp and Telegram level UI wise, much more user friendly for "normies" like family and friends, while Matrix and XMPP are more "nerdy" and hard to understand and onboard

Nice multi-device (that actually works without encryption problems) and multi-account support.

Security-wise it is easy to end up sending unencrypted messages in XMPP (groups are often unencrypted due unusable otherwise) and in matrix it is also a mess with "unable to decrypt" and the reactions are not encrypted. ArcaneChat groups and 1:1 chats have a concept of "protected chats" via scanning QR or invite links that are warrantied to be e2e encrypted and safe against MITM attacks.

Groups in XMPP depend on the server, if the server dies the group is lost, in Matrix the groups metadata is spread across several servers, in ArcaneChat the servers are agnostic of the group state, the group lives in the users's devices and hence don't depend on any server, user can even migrate account/address and keep participating in the group

The server requirements for ArcaneChat are super lightweight (ex. https://arcanechat.me/ has +700 users right now and it is only using ~500MB of RAM and ~3GB of disk) in this regard XMPP might also be similarly lightweight but Matrix is well know for the complexity and requirements on the server

ArcaneChat is offline-first, you can fully use the app while being offline, even create groups, search across all your groups, messages and contacts, play in-chat mini-games or use collaborative tools like in-chat WYSIWYG editors etc. send messages etc. and all will be nicely synchronized when you go back online.

ArcaneChat is super lightweight, apk size in google play is only 13-15MB while being feature rich and beautiful

creating bots to provide extra functionality (similar to telegram bots) is easy and there are already several bots available and discoverable in the app.

Now lets talk about some downsides:

ArcaneChat doesn't support integrated phone calls at the moment (but it is planned, and it has jitsi meet videocall invitation integration)

ArcaneChat doesn't support discoverable public groups or channels (it is an app for private chats, you can invite people to group via invite links tho, and telegram-like channels are in the roadmap) a public bot can be used to list and join "public" groups tho, but at the moment everyone in the group is admin, there is no group admin concept as groups are private

there are more stuff to say but this post is too long already 😅