Always more secure? Analyzing user migrations to federated e2ee messaging apps

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With the current massive user migration from X and Meta to decentralized social media such as Mastodon, the interest in federated communication infrastructures is gaining traction. We have been documenting similar tendencies since 2018 already, analyzing how users in various contexts shift their preferences in terms of secure messaging applications. In the context of a longitudinal study of secure messaging apps users and developers this presentation proposes to analyze several waves of user migrations and suggests an analytical framework to understand the changes in the perception of what’s a “good secure messaging app” with a particular attention to federated architectures and their potential. The “Signal gate” has shown that cryptographic properties of a messaging app per se do not offer a guarantee of security, and many other (sometimes even non-technical) qualities enter the game. We propose to understand digital security as an evolving sociotechnical process of adjusting tools and behaviors and to question the race for an “always more secure” messaging app. We argue that infrastructural choices (centralized vs decentralized vs distributed) and social practices (such as contact discovery) matter.

Creation date: July 2, 2025
Speakers: Ksenia Ermoshina
License: CC BY-SA v4
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