"Messaging Alternatives", a comparison tool

[moul]

It's natural than some of our most asked questions are things like "what's your difference with [INSERT ANOTHER APP HERE]"

We think that the best way to reply openly and transparently is to write it once for good, allow anyone to update the information, in particular, the developers of the alternative itself.

The needs are:

• to be editable by anyone
• to have two views,
  • one for "Berty Chat" that will list alternative messaging apps, and
  • one for "Berty Protocol" that will contain alternative P2P libraries
• to be easily readable, especially for non-tech

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Our current idea is to create a dedicated repo focused on allowing people to add/edit alternatives, probably .yml files

Then to integrate it somewhere automatically, i.e., on our website or a dedicated domain, if it makes more sense

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Very cool examples:

• https://www.eff.org/fr/pages/secure-messaging-scorecard
• https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

Ideally, we should be listed on existing tools, but the first one is not maintained anymore, and the second one will probably not accept apps that are still in development

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Feedback is much appreciated <3

[fte378]

If the tools are centralised the Terms of Use should be evaluated if they value privacy. For example Threema and WhatsApp may have many similarities but the Terms of use differ significantly.

In this way the second resource is much better.

Maybe also a history of security breaches would be a good quality indicator.

[fte378]

What about a collection of markdown files (one for every tool) where the table is generated from Frontmatter variables then?

[cdeleeuwe]

@fte378 sounds good. I think we could use a headless bundle (https://gohugo.io/content-management/page-bundles/#headless-bundle), and use the Frontmatter variables for each tool as you suggested.

Not sure where to host it, but we could integrate it directly on our website and add an "Edit on Github" link for each row/tool. @moul what do you think?

Page Bundles

Content organization using Page Bundles

[moul]

let's go with that 👍

[moul]

initial version is now available here: https://berty.tech/faq

lets people help us complete this table :) 🙏

note: if the current fields/possible-values are too limiting, do not hesitate to ping us so we can improve the tool to help to have accurate answers

Berty Technologies

FAQ · Berty Technologies

We build tools to enhance communication freedom

[moul]

oh and feel free to add "bad points" for berty, we made multiple hard choices (p2p, privacy-first, etc), with those constraints we can't be green everywhere