We have just released v0.4 of SimpleX chat - an open-source decentralized chat with a focus on users’ privacy.

 

Its main advantages over other chat networks:

- it does not use any global user identities - no phone numbers, emails, usernames, unique identifiers; there is nothing that would allow the network servers to aggregate the communications of users and have visibility of the graph of their contacts, unlike other chat solutions.

- it uses decentralised client-server network topology and message routing protocol - it's neither federated nor P2P, combining the advantages and avoiding the downsides of both (it’s covered here: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat#network-topology).

- it has no dependence on DNS for the core network; DNS will be used in the future for optional public addresses and discovery to establish the initial connection, but the message routing will not depend on DNS-based user addresses (unlike email, XMPP or Matrix).

 

The terminal chat client is available in https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat repo - you can either build it from source or download the binary for Linux, Windows or Mac from the latest release.

The new version added support for chat groups and sending files, and greatly improved chat stability.

 

You can deploy your own server, e.g. with 1-click deployment on DigitalOcean marketplace, but you don’t have to - you can use our servers.