You could turn the whole thing on its head, have users sign their messages and broadcast them to anyone; a direct message would be encrypted to the expected rec

You could turn the whole thing on its head, have users sign their messages and broadcast them to anyone; a direct message would be encrypted to the expected recipients. Now you don't care about the particularities of an instance or opening an account, becaus all the work is happening on your machine. There is no migration, only transferring your database from a computer to another. This is basically what secure scuttlebutt is doing: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/