all understandable questions.

group messaging

this is very complex as im sure you can imagine. im using a p2p and the approach im using is that a "group" is basically a "room with ID". when sending a message to a group, you send the message to the peers individually and they know to store the payload within the context of the "room with ID". scaling something like that is limited by how many webrtc connections are possible by the hardware.

i have some research relating to using MLS, but without some central store to keep the mls keys per-epoch, its very unstable as peers can go offline unexpectedly. another approach im investigating is to be able to ping connected peers to create a kind of mesh-graph that i could use to relay messages. this approach could also be better resiliant to peers going offline in the sense, that the graph could heal from peers going offline.

im sure there are many details i havent considered, but i have buggy group messaging on the WIP version here: https://enkrypted.chat/(go to chat-thread page > 3-dot menu on top-right > invite peer)

offline delivery

ive mulled over it enough to at least try using an approach to use git as a CRDT. it seems overkill for application data, but it would also allow use git as an offline message cache. https://programming.dev/post/51866250. i havent implemented anything for this yet. im still mulling it over to make sure i dont overlook important details.

alternative networks

webrtc isnt the bit that make this app secure, its the local-first. no need to register anywhere when you have local-first crypto-random IDs. im open to considering other networks. tor has limitations around webrtc. this is perhaps where the git-based offline cache can come in useful in a tor network. i2p is also good as are many others like nostr. i'll see what setup works best. i think it would be great to be able to support multiple.

if you want to know more about "how it works", you can take a look at the roadmap here: https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical/p2p-messaging-technical-breakdown

feel free to reach out for clarity instead of reading all that.

thanks. ive had that feedback before. its also not the easiest thing to type out. many are probably unable to find it again because the name wasnt memorable enough.

im in the process of rebranding to "http://enkrypted.chat/". talking about it to others could still lead to some confusion, but i think could be a bit more memorable to say "encrypted.chat, but with a 'K'."

I've come across it before. That one is good and easy to get started.

I also have another version to the approach where im refining details: https://enkrypted.chat/. (It's far from finished and not open source yet.)

Thanks! I haven't come across chatmail before. I'll take a look there and see how it works.

With git, I like that there are many providers with a free-tier. It'll make it easier to get started. Although it seems this way of using git could be against ToS.

thanks. i'll aim to do that. i'll see if i can figure out who to reach out to from github and etc to ask.

feel free to reach out. im reluctant to waste your time on reading through all that draft. its fairly unique and more going against the grain... not typically a good sign.

my project is far from finished including all the spec and docs.

That's right. Git as an offline cache. When you read a peers message, you can also update you own git repo to say you read it, and so when the peer comes online they can update their side to delete the messages (keeping the size small)... Going further against the grain, the app doesn't care about the history of messages deleted, so I expect to add things for purging history.

I considered the Blockchain, but i think the git approach is better. It's hard to describe what I'm imagining. I'd like to put together a demo when I get time.

I have a full-ish description of the protocol.

https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical/whitepaper/complete-protocol-spec

Instead of reading that, if you really want to know more, I would suggest you ask me for clarity. (Nothing about this git approach is mentioned there.)

In my app I'm aiming for minimal steps to get started. The frontend is a pwa which works out the box as a webapp.

There is a focus on local-first storage. When connected over webrtc, no backend storage is needed.

This approach with git would be optional. Users have frequently asked about the ability to send messages offline (a completely normal expectation for messaging app). It seemed like a hard limit until this idea with git. My app works without this feature, but with nuanced tradeoffs.

If I host a git-sever myself, but that would be centralising my project.

In any case it wouldn't be on my account. It would be great for users to self-host. Things like GitHub would only make it easier to get started to test things out.

Why would they ban my account? That would be unsettling. I'm a developer. The code itself is fairly basic git stuff.

My project is hardly popular, but if it gets there, I'm sure it would impact githubs performance. Would the concern be that my app ddos GitHub? I can explicitly prevent remotes like GitHub if necessary.

I'm happy to advise people to self-host a git server. That would be ideal. The ability to do it on GitHub or codeberg would only make it easier to get started. I can put logic there to prevent using a remote with from GitHub if necessary.

In any case, it wouldn't be on my git account.

This is all ultimately for my project which is a fairly unique approach to secure messaging. I'm trying things out.