The creator of Pixelfed announced an upcoming encrypted messenger for the fediverse that will work across the fediverse
mastodon.social
It will be open source, end to end encrypted using Signal’s double ratchet encryption protocol, and he plans to make it easy for fediverse platforms to integrate it. The beta will release later this month.
He’s also the creator of https://fedidb.org btw
While I doubt I could get my friends and family on yet ANOTHER messaging app in the year of our lord 2023.
Sup. Is a fucking brilliant name.
Could be a fantastic way to replace dm, that's my first thought.
I remember idly wondering how DMs worked in Lemmy, and I was kinda shocked when I realized they aren't secure.
"secure" is relative. They may not be e2e encrypted, but they are still encrypted via TLS, like any HTTPS traffic. It's the same encryption used for online banking. If you care about your instance admin being able to read your messages, you should use Signal or a Matrix client though.
But remember that only a few years ago, almost nobody used e2e encryption, and it wasn't much of an issue.
Double rachet encryption protocol is also rather dope
I personally hate the name, but only because I had a roommate in college who would start every conversation with “sup.”
On text messages, IMs, in person, you name it. It really started to get under my skin.
But I hope the software is good.
sup.
Yep. That’s what he’d do. So basically he’d always want you to start the conversation.
No man, you're just supposed to say "Sup." back to them and then repeat ad nauseum.
After a few sups, the least dominate of the two has to say "nunmuch chu?"
So, you're playing a little Playstation, huh? That's whack. Playstation is whack. 'Sup with the whack Playstation, 'sup?
(what')SUP 🤪
I might know that guy lol
I think it will integrate with the existing fediverse
I just saw this on Mastodon and was about to post it here. 😄
Pretty cool idea. Though I'm not looking forward to trying to convince my friends to switch to yet another new platform. 😂
Im mainly looking forward to it replacing the “DMs” of mastodon and lemmy.
I've not been on either platform long enough to use the DMs, but this is a good point.
After all, DMs aren't actually private on either platform, as far as I'm aware.
If they're not end to end encrypted, your messages are not actually private on any platform.
It's a bit more obvious in the Fediverse than elsewhere, as direct messages are generally stored on two separate servers (sender and receiver). Furthermore each server tends to be smaller: if Zuckerberg decides to go through people's DMs it's unlikely to affect any particular Facebook user, but if the owner of a Mastodon instance does the same it's small enough that she could actually get an overview. It's mostly a false sense of security embedded in larger services, but people are all about having a false sense of security.
Like anything, depends on the threat model. Private from your little sister? Probably. Private from your boss, at least in the next few months prior to them being leaked? Also probably. Private enough?
That's to some extent a question that can only be answered individually, as everyone's threat models differ. I suppose this fact (everyone having differing threat models) is one of the reasons that so many arguments occur over security.
In the end any successful chat service is going to be used by horny teenagers sharing nudes with each other, which is honestly for me better reason than any state secret why all communications should be end to end encrypted at all times. I don't trust Zuckerberg or Musk with that, or any other third party for that matter.
"Private" is not really a binary concept.
They're "private" in the sense that no one can see them other than the participants and the server admin (if they really wanted to).
They're not private in the sense that they can be hacked and leaked, or subpoenaed.
Yep. That was my first thought - how everyone says to use Matrix rather than Lemmy DMs for anything sensitive. This will be fantastic.
TIL you can DM on lemmy
Right now I just think about me and how I'll use it. I'm eager to try this messaging app to have a way of being reachable by like-minded people.
To put it differently, I don't want to be a slave of others' choices. I know the network effect is real and that I'm powerless to break it. So I'll just change my attitude, and embrace this wave. Who knows what will happen? And in the meanwhile, I'll have fun using what to me seems right.
Tell 'em it's the last one they'll need to.
This is good.
It really is. In the past a new messenger or Plattform was always annoying as it inevitable meant, how can I get my friends to use this. But with activity pub it doesn’t matter anymore. Everbody can use the fediverse software of his taste and we can still all be interconnected. What a relieve. So many software solutions can compete against each other without us having always to start from zero. Brave new world.
I've been unhappy with the direction Signal has taken in recent months and Matrix always felt like it was trying to do too many things at once.
Happy to see something that would integrate directly into Fediverse platforms as it will greatly enhance interplatform communication.
Like a better FB messager.
personally love the direction Signal is heading but would be happy to not have "all my eggs in one basket", as well as diversifying the open source E2EE communication options.
I felt that removing SMS while still having it tied to your phone number, stories, and that weird cryptocurrency were not what I was looking for in a messanger.
I also don't like the fact that Signal needs your phone number and that the only way to connect to other people is by their phone number.
And that your phone number inevitably leads to being spammed
TIL Margot Robbie has strong opinions about encrypted messaging apps. My respect grows by the day.
Everybody just want to ask me about my opinion on work, nobody ever ask me about my opinion on tech.
But using an obvious AI generated profile picture and all of a sudden I can just express opinions on things now.
I agree. As soon as the update that disabled SMS was pushed to my phone, signal was effectively dead.
Integrating with SMS was so smart. The person who got me into it said "there is literally no reason not to do it" because it was seamless. And I used the same argument to get other people into it. But basically everyone stopped using it as soon as SMS was removed. I don't have the brain space to remember who is on signal and who is not and go to the appropriate messenger.
I read the whole long thread on their website where the devs were arguing in favor of this and all the reasons were IMHO stupid. I think someone wanted to tank signal. Got tired of funding it probably. It was too good to be true with no obvious business model so always thought the day would come, and it did. Too bad, it was very good at what it did.
Makes a lot more sense when you realize they hired an ex-Google exec to run Signal.
Meredith Whittaker? Artificial Intelligence researcher
[0], not ex-Google exec, Meredith Whittaker who "led global walkouts"[1]against Google? Meredith Whittaker who "helped lead employee protests at Google over the search giant’s military work, artificial intelligence and policies"[2], Meredith Whittaker?If that's who you're talking about, they chose the right person to lead a project that goes completely against the silicon valley M.O. of selling your private data to the highest bidder or mining it to sell ads. Her actions have demonstrated she isn't afraid of speaking up or pushing back against "the hand that feeds you", even at risk of being retaliated.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/04/23/google-a-i-researcher-says-shes-being-punished-for-organising-a-mass-walkout/[1]https://news.sky.com/story/google-walkout-leader-meredith-whittaker-leaves-company-following-claims-of-retaliation-11764114[2]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-protest-leader-meredith-whittaker-015305645.htmlI like her politics and activism, I just don't think Google and ex-Google people know the features people want out of a messenging app.
Yes I'm still very unhappy over Allo.
Same, it had so much potential, but seems to have been poorly managed.
This take doesn't make any sense. Signal is funded by a non-profit and has tons of money that allows them to not worry about funding in the near feature. There is nobody to "get tired of funding" them.
You should try Beeper too.
Beeper is truly fucking amazing.
I’d never heard of that until now, looks amazing!
SimpleX looks intriguing
It's great, I'm migrating all my contacts to it. AGPL, no phone number or identifier, decentralized, official lemmy community, fast development pace, ...
Makes more sense as matrix client than ActivityPub
Oh god matrix is such a bitch to handle and deal with, laggy and just in need of so much work. I'll be so happy to have an alternative.
I used it and hosted it for months with friends and family and we all got locked out due to bugs and had neighboring federated servers that wouldn't connect.
What year? I've run a docker synapse for a couple years with no issues (other than iOS client encryption bugs). I was surprised I could run it without a restart for 6months+
This year. I gave it a VPS with plenty of cores and memory too. It's like once I got it working it would work for awhile right, nbd. But then when I'd join a federated room over on matrix.org it would literally take days to add it. I even smoke tested it with their federation tester.
The lockout I'm describing is like an auth bug. The moment you sign in in a couple different places it has trouble unencrypting messages and even if you verify the other devices identity it will act like it's still unrecognized, and delete messages. It happened to my girlfriend, then my friend, then me. Twice in two separate attempts to use it daily. I tried using it as a complete iMessage replacement across all platforms so I'm saying I was using it heavily.
And yeah I used docker too. It's a neat concept it just falls apart at scale from what I've literally seen twice. Doesn't matter what client I used either.
just yesterday element literally gave up on joining the nix matrix space after staying at joining for hours on my selfhosted dendrite instance
a week or so ago the exact same thing happened with the arch matrix channel
I'm still trying to figure out why this would be used over Matrix. It seems to be the same without bridges?
this rocks actually. I've kinda wanted this for a while
I’m not leaving Signal until someone implements keeping data at rest encrypted on both ends and requires multi factor unlock (bio+pin is my choice).
So sick of E2E clients that leave the data in plaintext on the devices and then back it up in plaintext to the cloud.
Does Signal back up in plaintext in the cloud? (If so that doesn't sound like E2E encryption… unless the 'ends' are uh… also constituted as the cloud itself which is… defeating the purpose).
Where do the pub/ private keys live, exactly, tbh. (Assuming it is asymmetric encryption that they use?)
Edit: ah, misread. I thought you said that you were not joining it due to it storing plain text in the cloud.
Signal doesn't store any of your chats at all. They're all on-device by design
Hm... If they're not being stored on the cloud, that means offline users would never receive messages, unless Signal is purely P2P. I haven't looked at the project, or the source, but I find it hard to believe -- you can't really do user lookups without some sort of middleware in the cloud.
You're right, Signal is not P2P. The way Signals messaging pipeline works is like this - note I'm oversimplifying it for accessibility.
Sending a message to
BobSend.Bob.Bob- this means Signal's server can see its a unique user, but not what their name is.See their blog post about Private Contact Discovery, they've spent a long time figuring out how to engineer a method to know as little as possible about you.
Thanks for the explanation.
All the data they have on any specific user is the account creation date, and the last online timestamp. They've already done loops around this topic in the DOJ.
And I thought it should be obvious that an online service doesn't work if you're offline
Yeah, but messengers, such as WhatsApp for instance, will send you missed messages once you're back online. That's what I was referring to.
No, signal does not do cloud backups. The keys live on the end users devices.
Your link,
https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110836811082599292%20sup.%20is%20an%20open%20source%20encrypted%20fediverse%20instant%20messenger,%20similar%20to%20whatsapp,%20made%20by%20pixelfed.%20%20The%20beta%20will%20be%20launching%20later%20this%20month,%20and%20btw%20most%20fediverse%20accounts%20will%20work,%20not%20just%20Pixelfed%20%F0%9F%98%89is broken. I think you accidentally copied the body text as well. Cleaning up the link results in https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110836811082599292, which works fine.Thanks, fixed.
Great news that it will work across the fediverse. I'd love to try pixelfed for example, but its got too much of a walled garden thing going on since nobody I know uses it.
I just uninstalled Pixelfed. Mostly because the app is absolutely garbage on Android, and the developer made it look like an iOS app.
The app is just so dead. I'm happy to revisit later, but as for now I'll stick with posting my stuff on Mastodon and Lemmy.
Fedilab works great for me.
Sadly it doesn’t look so much like an iOS app, more like a bad Instagram clone 😕
Honestly, I don't hate that Idea much bcoz I think it will help users switching from IG to PixelFed.
so this is basically fb messenger but it works with twitter, YouTube and reddit (their federated alternatives mastodon peertube lemmy) and is e2ee!
super cool!
Desktop fscking client, please. Not electron based would be nice, yes? QT is good.
ICQ-style or old Skype-style user directory would be wonderful too. VoIP is not something I'd care about, file transfers are.
This is cool.
Chill, you’re not the only one here.
VoIP in a mainstream messenger is something that most people use nowadays to avoid calling people from their SIM cards which costs them much.
Video calling too is something I personally use too especially on iMessage or Telegram.
I’m a software engineer, I appreciate some old school things that work perfectly well like ICQ or Vim or emacs or working only with shortcuts. But you know what’s also a shortcut? Not having to use 50 different messengers just because this one doesn’t have VoIP and I can’t bring my friends or my mom here but I can bring only my nerd friends”.
This is all business and target audience oriented. You are not the only target audience out there and especially when you don’t demand from a messenger to be able to have VoIP. Even Instagram has VoIP these days. A photo-video-media sharing app. Let alone a messenger.
Chill, you're not the only one here.
I talked about various audiences not just myself. The person I replied to talked as if the app was made for him explicitly. "VoIP is not something I'd care about, file transfers are" like this kind of talking is like bruh, the app is not made only for you.
yeah, the app is made for you and him. So doing the math we have a -1 "VoIP is not something I'd care about" and a +1 "Video calling too is something I personally use..." which results in 0% significance. So let's just talk, voice our opinions, and chill.
No, the app is made for everybody who wants to use a messenger. Not just you and him. It's supposed to be under the standards of the feddiverse.
The comments here are not a poll. Providing especially personal comments about a nerdy user like me and the guy I replied about "I would like it like ICQ" and such shit, would not help the creator make a good choice. Most people nowadays, especially zoomers, dont even know what ICQ is or how it works or how to even login to it. Most people, proven by ehm ... the success of messenger, discord, whatsapp, telegram, viber, signal everything ... want a messenger that provides what the mainstream messenger wants with most of the features that everybody provides and are mainstream used while having ease of access.
We should try to help the creator. Not misguide him. Again, the comments are not a poll, they're supposed to help to make a constructive conversation. And when you talk as if the app is made only about yourself, you're not really helping.
We don't take kindly to people who think they're the only one here.
I'm not a fan of Pixelfed, or instaclones. But the idea of a messenger e2ee that works with all the fedi is such a awesome idea.
Why are you not a fan? I'm genuinely curious, as I'm vaguely evaluating such software.
Not OP but personally I just don't like picture centric social media. Just not my thing.
How is this different than something like Matrix? I'm probably just not understanding something...
This is meant to work with the ActivityPub fediverse ie. Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Pixelfed etc. and you would be able to use your current lemmy.world account for messaging.
But why is that such a great benefit? We already have a myriad accounts for different services/platforms; would this be merely a marginal improvement over the current situation?
I wonder, what 'works with the fediverse ' could mean for a messenger and what could be features not already implemented by different messengers, like elements or the very signal.
From the side of the Messanger, it could implement stories from pixelfed and communities from Lemmy/mastodon/kbin etc.
I don't know if anyone is asking for this, but Whatsapp has both, so someone must be using them, right?
As from the side of every other fediverse app, I think it could be a good way of implementing DM functionality without developing and maintaining it for every single app. Maybe. I don't know really, depends on how it's developed/implemented
Will it support MLS? (I still don't quite know the relationship between Double Ratchet and MLS)
Why not Matrix?
I really like the promise of MLS, all IM apps being interoperable is an amazing thing
I'm not sure it means the apps will be interoperable, only that the protocol for sharing keys will be standardized.
I highly doubt that we will see any kind of standardization in the actual messaging protocols in the next 10 years.
I want this at the ActivityPub level, for direct/group messaging at least.
AP isn't really meant for real-time communication
I think AP will just be used as account authentication/creation with Signal software as the backend, but this is speculation.
Also, e2e means why federate communications.. no one except those in the chat can see what's being said. AP feels like the wrong tool for this job.
I'm very excited for this too. The fact that the majority of the comments are not "ewww who whants ANOTHER chat client" really shows how much demand there is for something like that in this crowded space.
Ok but why
Presumably because currently, activitypub doesn't have a module for secure message exchange that can't be snooped on by a server admin.
Not but there are 7369543 other "modules" you can already use.
Because fedi is going to take away all Meta/Facebook's proprietary toys, WhatsApp included.
Not likely
Why the hell not?!?
Because fragmentation of chat apps is bad
If there’s n of something and n+1 breaks it, then it was broken to begin with.
I find it interesting that people who don’t really think about these things much often have a default sentiment that everyone on a single platform is better.
It’s especially true of people who just exploit platforms for attention. It breaks the rules they have built up in their heads about how to be important and have status.
Just kinda thinking out loud here.
No one thinks that. We just think having everyone on a different platform is bad.
Can you clarify the nuance you are pointing out? I really have heard multiple people assume they will be forced to be on every platform if multiple platforms become active/popular. They express they think a single platform is preferable.
I explained this in another comment. I don't want to have to keep 20 chat apps on my phone just to talk to my friends and family. I don't want another one. Pretty simple.
Oh, I see. I got way off track and was thinking about Social Media not messengers. Apologies.
What?
Competition is good, especially with regards to privacy and cyber security. Customers benefit when companies don't have a captured market. A lack of competition only leads to monopolies and stagnation.
If no one offers a secure product, then customers have no choice but to either not use anything or put up with it. Competition means that at any time a newcomer can offer a better product (that is hopefully open source).
Edit to add: Ideally you could message people on different apps with the same account. But I'll take fragmentation over a monopoly.
Hard disagree. People actually being able to use apps is good. The smallest amount of privacy and security is a thousand times better than WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever other Meta garbage people are using.
Wickr, Threema, Telegram, blah blah blah there's too many chat apps already.
You are already on another social media. Just not a centralized one.
...huh? Who is talking about social media?
You are on the wrong platform then
What are you talking about
Theres reasons to pm stuff. Some used it on reddit for stuff like exchanging adresses for trading tea, sweets, etc.
There are already hundreds of ways to PM stuff. Why do we need another?
I don't want to give strangers my personal cell, discord, twittter, whatever handle here publicly. If there is a need to exchange secret informatiom, how will you take this convo elsewhere?
How is it that your Matrix handle is "personal" but your Sup. handle is not?
I don't have matrix?
Anyway: Platform specific handle being "public" is not a problem. What is a problem (to me) is the association with other platforms I am on. No one besides those that actually should know it (hence PM), need to know it.
Do I reuse my username on many platforms? Sure do.
Do I need to tell you? Nope brother!
Also: Why should I take my conversation from here to exchange confidential information than just letting it stay here?
My point, exactly.
I've already answered that.
Nice🔥
I don't think this could convince the rest of the family to switch off Line, but I'm pulling for it.
I don't think it would work if it was offline, would it? /s
That's awesome
I am excited for this!
Thanks you Daniel superman supernault @dansup@mastodon.social. @dansup@dansup@mastodon.social
Another messenger = another target for all who hate it. This is another way - let's see them target that channel.
I don't get it. It's a blank page. Is there some obsolete tech I need to re-enable?
Not blank for me. I see a bunch of graphs and statistics about the fediverse.
I get the graphs, too. Kind of reminds me of the sites I'd use to monitor COVID infections a couple of years ago. Maybe the earlier poster tried to load the site during a server outage (or maybe their own Internet connection had a hiccup.)
This sounds fascinating!!
This seems highly sexual