because it is a centralized service from US company, registration requires phone numbers so it is easy to know from what country you are, the server is running in Amazon Web Services, etc, while ArcaneChat can be used with your own infrastructure, for total technological sovereignty

for iOS and desktop you can use Delta Chat which is fully compatible with ArcaneChat

As alternative to WhatsApp, there is also ArcaneChat that is more user-friendly for normies: https://arcanechat.me/

When you send ANY message (it doesn’t matter if it is just text, image or other attachment) it is end-to-end encrypted and on the server it all looks the same, encrypted blobs, it is only visible in your devices.

If you have a single device the encrypted blobs are deleted immediately after downloading them, if tyou have more than one device, the blobs are stored up to 20 days in the server to give you the chance to sync your devices, if you use “disappearing messages” option or manually select and delete messages or use the “clear chat” option, then you have more fine control when it is removed.

About your friend being offline, the same rules apply, they will be able to download the images and other messages you send to them as soon as they come back online within 20 days :)

Of course, if you host your own server you can tweak it to your needs if the defaults of arcanechat.me don’t suit you

Sure thing! ArcaneChat is decentralized: https://github.com/ArcaneChat/server

I bet it is using more resources than my +1400 people server 😅 but yeah for 10 people it is probably OK with matrix as long as they don’t join some crazy federated groups etc

Yes

If you do, you can join this group: https://i.delta.chat/#6CBFF8FFD505C0FDEA20A66674F2916EA8FBEE99=&a=invitebot%40nine.testrun.org&g=ArcaneChat+Community&x=3KvvQZfzU4t-9u5s0PF3USGp&i=AQKH9_8x0R0&s=dbGW9xOhRQX

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)