Wavelength

By making Groups hierarchical they can even reinvent Forums.

On a mobile device.

And called a messaging app.

But it's a forum.

All of the state of the art end-to-end encryption in products I know of is free software.

Much more difficult to verify these claims otherwise.

Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.

Any conversation that includes OpenAI's GPT also necessarily can't be "completely private" or end to end encrypted as the service must have a plaintext of the messages to proxy them (in cleartext from their view) to their OpenAI APIs. It also then, you know, uploads your messages to OpenAI.

What's the point of e2ee messaging if the service provider and OpenAI can read it all the moment you loop in the headline feature (GPT in your groupchat)?

Ultimately, threaded e2ee groupchat is a feature (ideally a feature added to Signal), not an app/company.

Considering the amount of politically-incorrect, politically-sensitive etc. stuff (ukraine-russia war, anti government protests, recently anti-covid protests, basic software/... piracy, ...), having anonimity is a huge feature.

Forums have had private forums, public forums, paid forums, encrypted, shared, only trusted device networks, for everyone, federated.

My point is that this isn't new, and that's a good thing.

It resonates, "it clicked", because it's something we recognise.

When we recognise something then we can also tap into the deep history and learn from the possibilities of that and also reflect on how they failed at times (against social media).

I love forums, I would love to see forums become the predominant form of messaging again. Forums yield slower and richer conversations between groups as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of thousands.

Calling it what it is helps access the past and peer into the future.