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[email protected] It gets a bit worse, Telegram has a long-standing relationship with a Saudi organization that's essentially a govt arm in Riyadh, working in direct partnership to analyze and monitor an obscene amount of user data: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
They claim this only targets terrorist groups. I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.
Telegram can fuck off into the sunset.
You know what, in my head I think I want a whole new messenger.
There’s an indexer that acts as a phone book, but at the same time, people can bypass that by directly adding contacts.
All chat history and groups are peer 2 peer and are stored like torrents with the extended backup being self-hostable.
Recent chat history (up to 30 days) can be stored on the indexer, though they’re encrypted and so the server is blind to what’s in them. They should explicitly be opt-in.
Whenever a user adds a new client (device), all conversations recipients should have to approve in order for them to see the chat history.
It should also have all the bells and whistles, like emoji, stickers, groups, channels, etc.
What’s wrong with WhatsApp? Is there something I need to know?
Everything. Why would you trust Meta with anything?
It’s owned by Meta/Facebook a company that’s makes its money spying on users. Signal or Simplex Chat are much better choices.
Why though? In case of a public chat or a chat with at least few dozens of users it’ll already be excessive if it could work at all.
Like really P2P or E2E? Because I know at least one chat app that is serverless but doesn’t involve E2E apparently - tox. E2E is an overkill for big group chats because it means you have to re-encrypt every message for every new user for them to see it. Else if you rely on just a fixed shared key it’s not E2E anymore (which will make some people sad and hate your app).
For public chats, you wouldn’t need to approve, only for private chat groups.
Yep real P2P. The design is inspired by BitTorrent.
I get that but it kind of defeats the purpose. If your group is so small that it’s worth it for every member to approve new ones then it probably doesn’t produce enough content for each new member to care about.