[tor-relays] 2024 : time to stop using Telegram (e.g. in Bridge line communication.).

[fjord]

On Mon Aug 26, 2024 at 4:11 AM PDT, boldsuck via tor-relays wrote:
> On Montag, 26. August 2024 00:45:20 CEST eff_03675549 at posteo.se wrote:
> > Telegram is Russian and spying :
> > 
> > 
> > - creator Pavel Durov
>
> was arrested yesterday in France.
>
> In general, I would like to point out SimpleX-Chat.
> https://simplex.chat/ https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq
>
> I've been using it for a few months. Decentralized, no ID, protected
> metadata, multiple user profiles, some designs taken from the Tor
> protocol. All SimpleX servers optionally accessible via Tor and you
> can run your own private SimpleX server.

It does seem promising.

I would note the following:

1. It doesn't appear the server can launch exclusively on the Tor
network. Nor the client. Further, the server uses the IP as the CN
during initialization.  How much this matters, I don't know.

2. It's not clear to me how the client would be configured to
exclusively bind to self-hosted infra (except to add own servers and
remove all the ones in there by default).

3. It would be nice for someone to post about their experience
bootstrapping their own self-hosted SimpleX, soup to nuts, and how it
went, but I couldn't find any in a casual search, except some people
talking about it on Reddit (such as the QR code linking).  I'd like to
step through replicating someone's (working) approach, how they brought
it all together, what worked and what didn't, etc. 

> Jack Dorsey invested a large sum in further development a few days
> ago.

VCs do not invest without the expectation of profits, however modest
those expectations could be.  Profit motives aren't in and of themselves
a dead-end (as Proton AG creates a foundation to, as they say, "put
people before profits") ... but it gives me (opinion) some suspicion. 

It could be that jack is interested in the long tail of what SimpleX
means to growing some other companies.

$1.3M is not much, IMO.

"Name still reminds everyone of herpes." -- jack

Unfortunate, but as he says, fixable.

But the bar for using SimpleX for sharing bridge lines probably isn't
lower than Telegram.  There could be chilling effects associated with
Durov's arrest, so self-hosting could become very important.  It should
have already been important, but the sheep don't care about these things
until they're under threat.

fjord