Any Open-Source RCS apps yet?

Mikel@lemmy.farley.pro to Technology@lemmy.world – 81 points –

Are there any apps that support RCS that aren't made by Google or a crappy cellular provider (ie: bloatware Verizon apps)?

I appreciate the features RCS has, but I'd love to get that without sending it all to Google with a "trust us" approach to backdoor keys. The documentation I looked at indicated that anyone could setup an app to support RCS and communicate with Google's RCS users, but I can't find any apps that actually do that.

Also would love to be able to message from multiple devices using RCS, which Google has working in their web app.

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Signal is two things, a protocol to use over something else, and a proprietary service.

Matrix is an example of a total solution.

Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.

Every time I look at Matrix it looks really cool and sounds great. But each time I try to setup a client or actually use it, nothing works, apps crash, and I can't actually use the dang thing. I tried setting up my own server, even tried using a public server with the Element web-app and still nothing worked, couldn't join rooms, etc.

Love the idea, haven't seen a decent implementation yet. Honestly kinda wish there was PGP for sms or something like that. I couldn't care less if the transport is insecure, as long as I can trust that only the intended recipient and myself can read/modify my messages.

Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.

You can't. Signal's server is closed source. Only the clients are open.

I just discovered Signal open source the server. Please kindly disregard what I said. I had the old news in my mind (maybe).

Signals server software is open source. I suspect you mean the main signal network is closed and centrally controlled (it's not federated basically) - anyone can run a private signal server (and network) but not as a node within the main signal network is my understanding.

Maybe they meant that at some point a few years ago Signal didn't update their public open source server code for neraly a year or so while simultaneously rolling out new features.

I thought it was something like that. What I really want to see is an open-source version of Briar.

Briar is open source, but yeah, check out SimpleX Chat

I just checked and you're right! I looked into Briar a while ago and ignored it because I couldn't run the Briar-Mailbox program on Linux.

I don't think it runs on iOS yet either, which may limit who you can contact with it.

I have an off-grid Linux box that hosts a local Wi-Fi network and some communication and entertainment apps. I want to host a chat service for asynchronous off-grid comms. Briar looked like the perfect option if I could just add the mail-box to my Linux box.

Simplex looks like it might do something similar, but it doesn't look like it does comms over direct Bluetooth.

It doesn't. But you can run your own server pretty easily.

You could also check out Jami. It doesn't do direct Bluetooth but it works on a lan if you run your own dht... proxy? bootstrap server? It can also do local discovery over udp, but I haven't tried that yet. I think async may chew up battery though

Maybe your own matrix server?

To add to what others have said, Signal's server code is open source, but they took the anti-spam module closed source last year

Matrix doesn't have forward secrecy, and signal is not proprietary, it's free and open source,

And Matrix does not fall back to SMS (unless someone implements such a Matrix client).

It would also be silly to try to get everyone you know to use YOUR Matrix client, or one compatible with it.