2y ago

The creator of Pixelfed announced an upcoming encrypted messenger for the fediverse that will work across the fediverse

Mastodon

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

Technology @lemmy.ml

jackpot @lemmy.ml

2y ago

new federated encrypted messenger by the guy who made pixelfed

mastodon.social /@dansup/110836811082599292

Fediverse @lemmy.ml

maegul (he/they) @lemmy.ml

2y ago

The creator of Pixelfed announced an upcoming encrypted messenger for the fediverse that will work across the fediverse

mastodon.social /@dansup/110836811082599292

153 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- Tell 'em it's the last one they'll need to.
- 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.
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.
- He's a madman
  
  Of the good kind
- I wonder if he is friends with the guy who runs calibre and kitty terminal. I read somewhere that he was seriously planning to single-handedly maintain python 2 after it was EOLed because it was so integral to calibre. But was eventually talked into transitioning to python 3. The idea of that is totally nuts; the guy is a machine.
- I've been following Daniel since he started working on Pixelfed and dude's a beast. His code and skill improved astronomically and he just doesn't stop. Great example of how "doing it" is best way to learn anything software related.
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.
- You should try Beeper too.
  
  I’d never heard of that until now, looks amazing!
  
  Beeper is truly fucking 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+
- 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
  
  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%89 is 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.
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 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
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.
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!
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 😕
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?
- Can you use matrix with a lemmy or mastodon account?
- I have no idea what the fediverse brings to an E2EE IM app. They seem like contradictory concepts.
  
  no walls?
- According to this post, Signal can federate, but chooses not to. In another post, it's said that Matrix is based off Signal.
  So, one way to look at it announcement is "you will be able send Signal/Matrix messages from your fediverse instance of choice", I believe
  
  Huh. I wonder what they mean by “bad user UX”. I was expecting concerns about encryption or privacy, not UX. I already use Signal, so it would be a positive for me if they federate.
  
  Kind of surreal seeing my own Mastodon post linked, damn.
  If you're curious about the details I refer to, there's an indepth article on lwn.net regarding this from 2016 here: https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/
  
  “you will be able send Signal/Matrix messages from your fediverse instance of choice”
  While no details are clear, it'll definitely not be this. Matrix has it's own implementation which isn't compatible with signal (megolm or something like that), and I really don't think dansup will be making it matrix compatible. It'll probably be its own thing.
  
  Signal has been the basis of basically every private messenger since it's inception. They may have since forked but they're almost all based loosely on it's concepts.
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 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.
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
- 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'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.
I don't think this could convince the rest of the family to switch off Line, but I'm pulling for it.
- switch off Line
  I don't think it would work if it was offline, would it? /s
Nice🔥
That's awesome
This sounds fascinating!!
I am excited for this!
Another messenger = another target for all who hate it. This is another way - let's see them target that channel.
Thanks you Daniel superman supernault @dansup@mastodon.social. @dansup@dansup@mastodon.social
He’s also the creator of https://fedidb.org btw
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.)
- Discord is a centralised, proprietary service, sup would be a fediverse app. Discord is better than Sup just like Reddit is better than Lemmy.
  
  I'd be so excited to see any fediverse do the discord server/channel setup, and as soon as I see it I can start convincing friends to join it.
This seems highly sexual

153 comments