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Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations

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Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations

#1

Post by ArVID220u »

Hi everyone! I’m Arvid, cofounder of Anysphere (https://anysphere.co). With my two friends Sualeh and Shengtong I have been spending the last few months building a dedicated home for important, long-form conversations. We’re super excited to let the HN community test it out!

We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter. Instant messaging is filled with careless texts and stickers, email is filled with receipts and spammers, and physical mail, while better in those respects, is slow and cumbersome. None of the existing platforms are private enough.

Anysphere attempts to fix this. It is private, secure, desktop-first and only allows people you added to contact you. Our whitepaper (https://anysphere.co/anysphere-whitepaper.pdf) describes our privacy and security model in detail — in short, we protect all of your data and metadata against everyone (even our own server). Our client is fully open source: https://github.com/anysphere/client.

We deployed a small server to open up testing to everyone in the HN community. Instructions are here: https://gist.github.com/arvid220u/d960ca6483bf5f295498d9de99....

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations
gist.github.com

Re: Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations

#8

Post by ArVID220u »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #7

> The world's first completely private communication platform. You have got to drop statements like this. It’s obviously false, and is embarrassing to read. I didn’t bother looking further into the software after this.

With all respect, it is not obviously false. You should take a look at our whitepaper: https://anysphere.co/anysphere-whitepaper.pdf (the figure on page 2 might be helpful). To my knowledge, no other communication platform provides complete metadata privacy like we do. I would love to be disproved here though! It would be awesome if other completely private communication tools exist.

I do agree that there is a general problem where companies make hyperbolic claims, especially when it comes to security/privacy. For example, “zero trust” has been abused by so many people that even in the cases where it might apply, you cannot say that it applies to you because the term has lost its meaning. In our case, users do not need to place any trust in our servers, but we decided not to call it “zero trust” because people have taken it to mean “trust your employees less” or something else similarly outrageous.

If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our messaging here I’d love to take them. In other words, how could we convey that we are indeed the only completely private communication platform, without provoking a reaction similar to yours?

Re: Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations

#9

Post by shengtongzhang »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #7

> The world's first completely private communication platform. You have got to drop statements like this. It’s obviously false, and is embarrassing to read. I didn’t bother looking further into the software after this.

By "completely private", they mean "theoretically metadata private under the UO-ER security definition".

Re: Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations

#10

Post by sualehasif »

stuntkite wrote: post #4

I can't find any evidence of anyone using this. Need to look at github commits I guess. If this is a weird phishing scam, it's a clever one.

I appreciate the caution. We are funded by the FTX Future Fund (https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/?_search=Anysphere). Feel free to look through our github (which is why we are open source).
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