Haven't found the one yet:
- open source software, doh
- end-to-end encryption...
- has browser frontend and Android app
- public URL without sharing your mobile phone: messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- self-destroying messages (turned on by default please)
- user base large enough to give some confidence that it was reviewed for security issues
- easy/built-in setup over Tor
Optional but really ideal:
- can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old
- decentralized, your username is a public key
The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrBiDRZRK5g Maxwell Lagrangian Derivation by Dietterich Labs (2019)
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo-Z3RO-eeY Deriving the Maxwell Lagrangian by Pretty Much Physics (2019)
TODO evaluate. No
pip install???You gotta be born after the year 2000 to understand it.
This is becoming more and more popular as a group chat with channels and threads possibility as of 2020.
Very similar to Slack.
They force your username to have 4 random digits? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43kjdl/whats_the_number_next_to_the_username/
Not possible to anonymously join just one server without creating a new account? What's the point of servers then! www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6gmjl7/changing_nick_before_joining_a_new_server/ Oh, also nicks don't hide your username from the server in any way, you can get the original username by just clicking on the person's username.
No proper threaded discussion without creating new channels? As of 2022 there is kind of a way, but it was a bit obtuse.
As of 2022 they also have a school hub: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ which auto creates groups by university email access. Good idea, and shows popularity amongst that user group.
Servers don't have an ID to join them? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/b9zdt6/join_discord_server_from_id/
Can only make public servers if you have 1000 members?? support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023968311 Why so much bullshit?? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6jouf8/how_do_i_make_my_server_public/
Discord is useless if you want to participate in more than one large group because of this. It is impossible to get email notification for selected threads you care about.
No way to get email notifications for missed activity? support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360041806392-Can-we-get-an-email-notification-option-for-messages-
Ciro Santilli worked on it for a brief time in 2016, when it was still called Ring, before he got fired. :-)
The people were quite nice and the project idea is fine, Ciro hopes they succeed.
Ring - Peer to peer network for real time communication - FOSDEM 2016 by Ciro Santilli
. Source. No chat only? .... community.jitsi.org/t/chat-function-only/79067
Appears to be based on XMPP: community.jitsi.org/t/jitsi-users-is-jitsi-a-regular-xmpp-server/13211
Basic must haves:
Other cool stuff:
- sealed sender: signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ Nice!
TODO what's the fucking official discussion/feature request forum?
- community.signalusers.org appears to be the de-facto non-official one.
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5372
- whispersystems.discoursehosting.net
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1318 closes and points to discoursehosting
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/549
- www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/lipo6z/community_signal_forum_vs_reddit/ gives some good history, says they pay for community.signalusers.org/ and have admin powers there.
Claimed to remove metadata from servers unless legally obliged to collect it: www.quora.com/Does-WhatsApp-store-messages-on-its-servers-or-is-all-deleted-after-delivery-and-only-stored-on-recipients-phones/answer/Ciro-Santilli
They claim to delete metadata: www.quora.com/Does-WhatsApp-store-messages-on-its-servers-or-is-all-deleted-after-delivery-and-only-stored-on-recipients-phones/answer/Ciro-Santilli
It is mindblowing that the sale wasn't cancelled due to anti trust.
The outcome of this is that WhatApp will remain with the same feature set forever, while other competitors have been growing, notably Discord and Slack.
It seems that there is a case looming 10 years after the fact: www.cityam.com/facebook-fails-to-block-antitrust-lawsuit-over-whatsapp-and-instagram-ownership/ Wake up???
This means that all secret services in the world have alrady scraped this information for everyone that uses WhatsApp!!!
They just have to go incrementally through the list of all phone numbers... 001 0000 0000, 001 0000 0001, 001 0000 0002, etc. and then you can deduce who has which phone number.
OMG... it is analogous to the Facebook profile face dump.
Sure, it is forbidden in theory: faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/about-harvesting-personal-information/.
As a result, Ciro Santilli who likes "lower level stuff", has had many many hours if image manipulation fun with this software, see e.g.:
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact