• 4 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 7th, 2021

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  • The purpose is already said in the title: private chats for the family

    How you don’t understand the use case of chatting with the family?

    As many other chat apps out there, if you meant the “why this one and not X?” Well there are other acceptable options out there, the advantage of this one compared to WhatsApp, Telegram and co. Is that it doesn’t depend on phone numbers or any private data, getting started with the app is painless and smooth, no SMS verification no captcha solving or complex registration, just set your name and start chatting. It is decentralized and anonymous, while having a nice polished UI easy to use on the level of WhatsApp and Telegram, unlike most other alternatives out there

    One special feature is the ability to use in-chat mini-apps that are completely “p2p e2ee” between chat members without depending on any server hosting it and working offline first, among such apps: collaborative editor pads, checklists/to-do lists, shopping lists, split bills with friends, chess and other mini-games etc






    1. if they leaked something you wouldn’t know because US government law doesn’t allow them to disclose if they requested data.
    2. uses AWS servers that also the gov could ask for access to Amazon directly without even talking to Signal, being centralized and depending on AWS infra is also a weakness.
    3. needing phone numbers to register, often tied to passport and it is super easy to get your whole network when compromising 1 device
    4. all centralized services start nice, attracting users, once they have you, and money starts being a problem… meet: enshitification







  • There are a lot of reasons for each of those will try to provide some at a glance:

    SimpleX, XMPP, Matrix: The client is more user friendly, less buggy and less “this is for nerds” UI than the clients of those networks, ArcaneChat is more on the WhatsApp-like UI

    Signal is centralized, depends on phone numbers so can’t be used by children in the family that don’t have access to SIM card yet etc. Registering in Signal is also more complicated, SMS verification, solving captcha etc. No good multi-account and multi-device as ArcaneChat.

    Groups in ArcaneChat are managed independent of the server while in XMPP they are created on a given server and if the server dies the group is lost, while in matrix a lot of group state is replicated and tracked by the servers, in XMPP is easy to end up with unencrypted groups and in Matrix you often get “unable to decrypt” and emoji reaction are not even encrypted, ArcaneChat groups are always encrypted and safe against MITM (green checkmark displayed in the group name)

    ArcaneChat has in-chat mini-apps that work independent of any server, communication is only between chat members and e2e encrypted, for example collaborative editor in chat, shopping list, split bill app, several mini games with shared scoreboards etc.

    ArcaneChat works offline-first unlike many(all?) of the previous mentioned apps you can even create groups while being offline use and modify the in-chat apps and all state will be synchronized when you are back online. The app also works in slow and unstable connectivity when most of the other mentioned apps would simply not manage to connect.






  • Yes and no, it allows to login without providing any data or using any email account, in that case a random/anonymous account is created in arcanechat.me which is an email internally but optimized for chatting with similar speeds of other chatting platforms

    Also with arcanechat.me server unencrypted messages are not allowed at all so you can be sure you don’t accidentally leak any message, also all messages are removed from the server immediately after downloading them (or after a few days when using multiple devices)