I really want a Facebook (the old Facebook timeline) replacement, but end-to-end encrypted, and decentralised so there’s longevity.
Edit for clarity: I’m looking for a way to share things online, end-to-end encrypted to a wide-audience that knows you but doesn’t necessarily know each other.
This is why messaging apps don’t fulfil this requirement, and chat rooms (like Matrix) also don’t fit.
I love Lemmy, I like the idea of Mastodon (twitter-like sites just aren’t my thing. ActivityPub rocks. However, none of them are encrypted.
PixelFed is neato, but I don’t plan sharing my personal photos with the whole of the internet, which seems to be the only choice with ActivityPub.
Signal and other encrypted messaging apps are great, but are for direct messaging. Where are the encrypted social media apps?
Matrix is cool and all, but it’s aimed at groups. Like discord / MS teams replacement.
Someone told me about Futo Circles, which seems to tick all the boxes and built on top of Matrix, but it’s currently abandoned.
Are there any other alternatives? My wallet is open, I would very much like to use such an app. I am no programmer, so sadly cannot take on the mantle of continuing the Futo Circles project.
Appreciate you taking the time to reply, but this isn’t what I’m looking for
At least I couldn’t find any mention of end-to-end encryption outside messaging.
And it doesn’t appear to be timeline (i.e. you post and anyone who you’ve connected with can see it), it’s fully public blogs, private (but no mention of e2ee) chatrooms, and videoconferencing.
It’s built on XMPP. XMPP provides direct and group (room) communications. If you set up OMEMO, any message you send will be encrypted and only visible to the recipient(s).
What you are calling “timeline” is equivalent to what they are calling “blog”, the concept is the same: sorted feed of events which are published to network.
Are the blogs end-to-end encrypted? It seemed to imply that they are public.
Futo Circles describes what I’m after well: “a good way to share things with lots of people who don’t all know each other, but they all know you.”
This is where going a group is not what I’m after, as that’s what Matrix would be good for.
A XMPP room and a Matrix group are equivalent. You can, e.g, create a room, set it to “private” and only add the people you want to see your content.
As a matter of fact, I think you could have what you want even with a basic matrix client. This is actually what I do with my family: I didn’t want to share pictures of my kids on Facebook, so I created a “Family” group and we use to talk and share pictures.
Yes, I’m saying Matrix doesn’t satisfy my requirements of what I’m looking for, sadly :/
And I’m saying that your “end-to-end encryption” and “public timeline” requirements are conflicting. If you want e2ee, you will have to manage the rooms yourself. You can bet that even if you tried the Futo Circles client, you would still have to manage “who-can-access-what”, which implies that the room/group abstraction is still there.
There’s nothing conflicting about it. It’s not a public timeline, it’s “public” only to people you’ve added, no one else, including the server that would host your content.
Basically old Facebook (sharing just to your friends), without the spying, is what I’m asking for.
You would manage who can access what, by allowing/not allowing people to follow you
It’s not a group abstraction, at least for the user, since you’re not asking everyone to join the same group, and see each other’s content. Only yours, and in turn theirs.
Matrix is basically a group chat with bells and whistles, which is really nice, but isn’t what I’m looking for.
Which means that you have a protected room!
You mentioned you are not a programmer, so maybe you are missing one key information: it only makes sense to talk about “end-to-end encryption” when the sender knows the recipient a priori. You can not simply broadcast a message to any unspecified “wide-audience” and have it “end-to-end encrypted”.
Yes, you are. If you want the messages to be e2ee encrypted and which can not be spied by the server owner, you are in effect asking people “come join me on this room where we will have a shared secret to exchange messages privately”.
I understand that you are thinking in terms of an unified view, but this is an UX matter. If you want only a selection of people to be able to decrypt your message, you will have to add them to a group that you will have to manage it, and Matrix/XMPP already provide these mechanisms.
Yeah, I’ll convince them to join a service/download an app, join a server etc, but not necessarily the same group (in the sense that they won’t see each other’s stuff, just mine and whoever else they add). The wide audience I’m talking about is all the people I add, not the whole internet.
I’m essentially proposing a mass e2ee encryption messaging service, with a UI that amalgamates it into a single feed AND that people can customise what they’re notified for. (This is the concept upon with Futo circles is built, I’m not making this up our of whole cloth)
Like what Facebook is. Except, end to end encrypted.
Or hell, what WeChat moments is, except end-to-end encrypted.
No they are not end to end encrypted, but you can restrict access to subscribers only and if you self-host it, e2ee isn’t really needed.
This is antithetical to mass adoption if to get end-to-end encryption you need to self host :/
I’m not saying the service you’ve shared is bad, just it’s not what I’m looking for
XMPP is a tried and tested e2ee standard.
There is mention of e2ee voice and video chat on the site.
This service seems very fully featured, and I can’t quite tell from reading if it does support what I’m looking for, so I’ll just have to give it a try!
Thanks for sharing it :)