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1. No sane person would give email-read permissions to a random social network app. Not until you get massively successful. 2. No typical user will use a deskt
by NavinF 4y ago
1. No sane person would give email-read permissions to a random social network app. Not until you get massively successful.
2. No typical user will use a desktop app to browse a social network unless some features are impossible to implement in a webapp (e.g. Discord's screen sharing with sound)
3. That requires users to trust that your app is really end-to-end encrypted. They're not gonna until you get massively successful. Your servers would also need to tunnel a ton of data. For example, I'm pretty sure webapps can't make IMAP requests directly from the user's browser. You'd have to bundle a WASM TLS library in the client and run an open WebSocket proxy on your server to forward requests to any IP that might be an email server. Of course those IPs are often shared with other services. Thanks to end-to-end encryption and Encrypted Client Hello, you'll never know what fraction of your bandwidth is really being used to retrieve email.
Oh and my gut feeling says most of your users will be the sort of people that new users will not want to hang out with.
- bdcravens 4y ago> No sane person would give email-read permissions to a random social network app. Not until you get massively successful Not that long ago there were a ton of email startups doing exactly that, usually focused on Gmail.
- quickthrower2 4y agoYep, trust Facebook with your private info but not an open source app.
- NavinF 4y agoWho said I trust FB? FB is not your competition and "open source" means nothing to literally 99% of users. Look, you’re not the first guy to come up with an idea like this. We’ve all thought about it and shot it down 5 minutes later because building anything useful on top of email is really really hard. I brought up at least one serious technical problem that makes the E2E encrypted webapp you described very tricky. Why not just use email for optional contact discovery like every other app instead of shoving all the data through email?