(fallen london stamps by once again I am feeling mighty twitchy about how much of my life lives on Discord* and have been looking into alternatives. maybe I should liveblog my discoveries
*they haven't done anything recently, to my knowledge, but I Don't Trust Like That
my big thing is that with tumblr doing its recent "sell its users' data to AI, including their private content" bullshit, it's not enough that a chat service pinky promises my most personal messages will never ever ever be used for skeevy shit. I want them to be nigh-incapable of doing so.
in other words, I need end-to-end encryption (E2EE), to self-host, or both. I don't have the mental bandwidth to handle self-hosting and the 24/7 technical/security weight that comes with it, so that leaves me with E2EE on some kind of managed host.
but the big issue is, E2EE introduces a lot of trickiness on the usability end, not all of which can be engineered away. for many clients/services, logging in on a new device or client won't replicate chat history onto it*, and if you lose all of your sessions and didn't back up your keys, you're kind of fucked. this is hardly a big deal for me, person who makes multiple redundant backups of their 2FA keys and has a whole password management system set up AND has a Disaster Recovery Plan for if the house burns down and I lose access to literally every device I own. but it's been increasingly clear to me that, for some reason, I am not the norm in this area.
one possibility I've rolled around is having some mix of E2EE chat spaces and non-E2EE chat spaces. I, like most people, would prefer that Exactly None of my chat history is capable of being sold or fed to a LLM sludge machine. but if it came down to it, I Guess I could live with like, my FFXIV convos being not E2EE. this would require some kind of social norm adjustment, in that people will have to be okay with the friction of being asked to open up Signal, or to move from the unencrypted to the encrypted Matrix rooms for a sensitive convo. but my guess is that this is a more palatable concept for less techy folks than discovering their new phone does not get message history for the entire history of everything
*though from what I can tell, Element for Matrix will replicate chat history