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Absolutely. Although the market for centralized secure messaging is currently being served adequately by the likes of Signal and Telegram, centralized messagin
by lewisl9029 11y ago
Absolutely.
Although the market for centralized secure messaging is currently being served adequately by the likes of Signal and Telegram, centralized messaging platforms inevitably leak metadata.
I don't want to belittle the work done by teams that have already started work on distributed messaging platforms like Tox and Matrix (and my own proof-of-concept, Toc [1]), but Mozilla is in a much better position to tackle the problem of decentralized, private messaging that also has great UX, and not just in terms of sheer resources:
1) They have (or at least had) a decentralized identity management platform in Persona.
2) They have a decentralized, zero-knowledge data sync platform in Firefox Sync.
3) They have a lot of influence in the web standards community that they can leverage to push a new federated messaging protocol to succeed XMPP.
This is the kind of work that I think Mozilla should be doing, because they can do it better than anyone else who's willing (i.e. not for-profit corporations, because they have very little to gain by building decentralized apps and federated protocols that have no lock-in whatsoever).
[1] http://toc.im/ http://toc.im/
- conradev 11y agoI would also include Ricochet[1] in the list of decentralized messaging tools, which is centered around Tor hidden services. [1] https://ricochet.im https://ricochet.im
- mook 11y agoAlso, Mozilla already had some IM support (XMPP, twitter, and yahoo, I think) in Thunderbird / Instantbird. IRC too, but that's a different sort of messaging.