Sorry, but I still fail to see how it's considered a good to have used $50 million to make "yet another messaging app" (because anything "for the masses" is "yet another thing" because of network effect).
With 50 million, one would have hoped instead that they would have helped improve XMPP, that they would have developed the "perfect" XMPP client that everybody could and would use, and that they would run "for free" one XMPP server with all the features one can expect of a good messaging service while letting the hard-core base have their own server if they want (no need to support the hard-core base, they do it already on their own).
Or maybe with Matrix if one really don't want to contribute to XMPP, but still, with OMEMO, ... I feel like all the "security features" are coming to the XMPP world.
I still believe that if you're not in control of the whole chain (open source client + open source server), you're not in control at all, because you still have to believe the they are doing what they are promising they do, without being able to verify it.
I, personally, think that neither Telegram nor Whatsapp, nor even Signal, are good for privacy.
Even if Pavel Durov say that Telegram has verifiable builds and open source client, as long as you're not in control of the whole chain (server+client), you're not in control at all. Even with e2e, an adverse party can always have access to lots of metadata, or with vulnerabilities as disclosed in this blog post, get access to the actual content.
Now that OMEMO is widespread in the XMPP world, I try to push in that direction, but as an other user has said, the hardest part is to get users to move to your "new" solution.
Maybe publish source and let people compile their clients themselves. For mobile platforms offer reproducible builds and a tool to checksum both your build and the package on the mobile. Caveat: I don't know whether totally reproducible builds are possible at all, and the checksum tool must be compiled too and uploaded as a test package to the phone. Probably only useful for groups of paranoid tech-savvy people.
Not the OP, but I studied at ETH Lausanne and visited at ETH Zurich, and it was my best academic memory, surpassing Paris, London or the other universities I attended.
So I recommend you a lot to try to get into this School, it's one of the best in the world, and the price of the education is a bargain compared to the comparable US universities.
In case someone gets confused searching for it, normally the federal politecnic university at Lausanne is called by its French name, EPFL.
ETH Zürich has better score in international ratings, but the EPFL doesn't lag behind much. It's a really top noch place to learn any technical career.
As this website is called HackerNews, I would suggest to install rather one of the numerous IoT platform such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and connect one of your devices to it. A Raspberry Pi is more than enough to do the job.
My problem with Joplin is that it's not "true" Markdown (because of the metadata) - as such, I can't just use it as a "let's finish later properly this Markdown file" kind of solution.
maybe because, among many other reasons, it takes so much f time for something to change in the XMPP world, because you have to wait for the XSF to validate any change, then all the server devs to implement it, then all the client devs to implement it, then all the sysadmin to update their (very often very old version of) XMPP server, then for the users to update their clients (which, with Android fragmentation for example, is a PITA) ?
I honestly don't understand why, especially on Hacker news, we do not push much more for privacy-oriented solutions.
Moreover, with Matrix/Riot, or with XMPP/Conversations, viable alternatives exist, and if we all would put the energy to make these softwares better rather than putting it into proprietary solutions like the one described here, the open alternatives would already be much better than the proprietary ones!
Sure, as I've read in this thread, Discord is intended for the same kind of discussions that would happen in a public space, or in a group, not for the "truly private discussions",so "no need for all the privacy features "... except you do, precisely for these reasons!
I mean, Discord is privately-owned, a public space by its verynature is not. If I'm talking about anything beyond how nice is the weather, such as my political thoughts, or what I love, I don't want anybody (but possibly me) to be able to make a profit through it!
With 50 million, one would have hoped instead that they would have helped improve XMPP, that they would have developed the "perfect" XMPP client that everybody could and would use, and that they would run "for free" one XMPP server with all the features one can expect of a good messaging service while letting the hard-core base have their own server if they want (no need to support the hard-core base, they do it already on their own).
Or maybe with Matrix if one really don't want to contribute to XMPP, but still, with OMEMO, ... I feel like all the "security features" are coming to the XMPP world.
I still believe that if you're not in control of the whole chain (open source client + open source server), you're not in control at all, because you still have to believe the they are doing what they are promising they do, without being able to verify it.