@cedar@kolektiva.social this is why the work #Bonfire and #Emissary and @evan@cosocial.ca are doing, bringing E2EE messages to the Fediverse, is so important!

@cedar Thanks for sharing these reflections! I have many different thoughts bubbling up in response. On the big points, I agree about many services we heavily rely on being very centralized and this being a glaring risk. I'm also with you on the importance of insisting that the foundations of our communications and organizing needs to be in-person first.

For the risk of signal pulling out of Canada, my understanding is that this was a real possibility in response to the version of C-22 being proposed in May and early June, and then mid-June the government made last minute changes to C-22 before it moved out of committee review, which apparently changed the part that was the biggest incompatibility for Signal and other encryption services. More info here: https://www.robertdiab.ca/posts/c22-amendments/

This seems to have ended the "maybe Signal will stop operating in Canada" scenario. The next phase for the law is senate review which is supposed to start later this month, but it seems unlikely that the Signal-incompatible element would be reintroduced into the law at this point. This is what I've found when I went looking, but if you've heard otherwise, I'm very curious to hear about it!

Back when a Signal lockout was being more seriously talked about, a lot of people started testing Delta Chat in preparation, following the recommendation of the comrades who have put the most effort I have seen into thinking though the currently most viable alternative if Signal is not available anymore: https://signal-contingency-plan.info/

Delta Chat is possibly what you're referring to as "email with a chat interface"? While it can run on regular email services, and this was how it worked originally, they now recommend using Chatmail Relay servers instead, which are still built on the email protocol and server software but designed specifically for the secure messaging use case of Delta Chat. There are dozens of these servers already available to use https://chatmail.at/relays and they seem relatively easy to setup so that seems promising for not relying on the few tech collectives that offer email services.

For the alternatives to Signal that you mention instead of Delta Chat, Briar announced a couple months ago was that after almost shutting down completely, the project has gone into maintenance-only mode: https://briarproject.org/news/2026-maintenance-mode/ It has always been an option with major limits and now it doesn't seem likely that it is going to improve.

For Simplex, I recently learned the founder and CEO of the company developing it is a supporter of the far-right in the UK. Officially endorsing the Reform UK party, boosting Tommy Robinson on social media, and climate denial are the three things I have seen but there is certainly more like that. Even if this weren't a relevant factor for whether or not to recommend use of the app in our networks, it being developed by a company backed by venture capital is a whole other red flag of its own in terms of the the medium-term trajectory of the company/software.

On a more posi note, Cwtch continues to be actively developed through a non-profit by people who I don't know personally but they seem lovely! As Signal alternatives, I think it is very worthwhile to understand its pros and cons in comparison to Delta Chat and use the one that fits the use case and threat model better, and probably use both. Even with Signal still being available, I think there is a case for using Cwtch for certain situations (on Tails, for example).

Recently, a lot of my effort in this domain has gone into learning about how to build more radically autonomous communications infrastructure using very power-efficient encrypted digital radio that can easily run on small solar panels and batteries. Specifically, the project Reticulum allows for building relatively secure and private communications networks that can operate over a mix of local radio, internet, local TCP networks, and more. It seems especially relevant for predictable future emergency situations, either ecological or political, when our usual internet and grid-power based comms infrastructure becomes less reliable.

The design philosophy underlying the Reticulum project is aligned with anarchists values in a number of important ways, so I think there's a lot of potential for us to figure out how we can use it and contribute to its development: https://reticulum.network/zenofreticulum.html