Migration recommendation: WireMin
I have been using it for a week and looked into their FAQ page for technology explanation. Here are some pros & cons:
Pros:
1/ 100% Anonymous:
- No need for an email/phone number to create an ID.
- Untraceable IP address.
- End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) for Direct Messages (DMs), Chat rooms, and Blog posts on the Feed.
2/ 100% Censorship resistance:
- Accounts never get suspended (at least that’s what they say in the FAQ).
- Content/Messages can only be deleted by the user itself (chat space too, no one can ban you or remove your message).
- E2EE, no one can decrypt your message, it’s only viewable by you and the recipients.
- Decentralized, no one can access your content because data is only kept on your device.
Cons:
- Not enough users, so the whole network is not stable enough due to its decentralized structure.
- Notifications are only available for DMs, not for Chat space or - - Updates on the following Feed.
- App crashes occur.
- Lacks some small features like polls/GIFs.
- Not open sourced but it is on the dapp store: https://www.alchemy.com/dapps/wiremin
Anyway, I think it could be a good alternative to Twitter/Facebook, due to their privacy issues and monopolistic behaviors. If you are a privacy-focused member, or if you run a sensitive topic community, I think it could be a good choice too.
The only thing I am concerned about is that they are not open source. As for the overall experience, I know they operate on a decentralized structure and personally, I do believe in the safety level of a decentralized network: 100% anonymous, 0 data leaks.
Here is a PrivacyMatters community, https://i.wiremin.com/invite/?g=k49693987788 mainly about TECH and DIGITAL PRIVACY discussion. If you download WireMin for privacy, this can be your first stop.___
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Not being an open source protocol means there’s no guarantee that it’s private or secure. It’s just another thing we have to trust without being able to verify. And if something happens, can you spin up your own instance?
Also, moderation is important to keep out spam and offensive material or trolls.
Unlike the Fediverse and similar projects, there are no servers nor instances at all. It’s exclusively Peer to Peer.
They explicitly opted to not have any form of moderation, instead just using Proof of Work, which should help reduce spam but doesn’t does much that about offensive content nor trolls.There are no instances, users need to exchange their IDs via some other way beforehand
I agree with you that moderation is needed. I think what they eliminate is the ability for users to create secret groups that can be found in the Discovery section (where people can see all the active chat spaces and feeds in the past 48 hrs). Secret groups are invite-only, while public groups allow users to simply click and join, making moderation not applicable in the latter.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by “And if something happens, can you spin up your own instance,” though.
Is that true? Because that’s actually really cool if so. Not that Facebook is going it, but that human dynamics can be predicted with sufficient information.
If you have data of a billion people you can analyze enough correlations so that some of them will stick. The problem is, that it is very different from figuring out causation. So you might find a correlation that people with two arts degrees tend to fail their relationships within 6 months, but the issue is not the arts degree but the higher rate of unresolved childhood traumata that led to art as a form of expression.
Note that the example is entirely off of my head and based on stereotypes. But this is precisely the issue with that kind of data analysis. It is based off on finding stereotypes and if they are used to influence the people through the content they are shown, the products recommended etc., it is reinforcing those stereotypes and changing people towards it.
Yeah, I used it for about a week, and remember I mentioned that they lacked some small features? Some users would ask the team in their official chat room for new features, such as vanish mode, GIFs, and stickers. The team would carefully consider whether these features might compromise user privacy or lead to data leaks. The dev team would then explain the potential implications to the users within the chat room and see if they still wanted those features.
I feel like a lack of moderation and some censorship could lead to some issues like mastodon had. How does WireMin combat those topics?
They don’t, FAQ states they don’t even have ability to do so
So a platform that can freely share illegal content and according to their FAQ can’t be censored but “may” be evidence?
"may” be evidence? wdym
It’s in their faq
For now, I guess not a lot of people are using it, so spam has not shown up yet. But what I mean is, if you have a feed space on WireMin, no one can post anything on your feed page. It’s kind of a decentralized version of Twitter, where you can have your profile page, and no one can post stuff on it. You can avoid spam in the discovery section because it only shows all active spaces within the past 48 hrs, and the same goes for public chat spaces. However, secret spaces might be a good location for a spam-free chat room.
In fairness I can predict with a fairly high degree of accuracy that the majority of relationships will fail. If I were to take a random Facebook user who updated their status to ‘in a relationship’ and said that the relationship wouldn’t be successful, I’d likely have a 99%+ success rate.
No open source clients means we just have to trust all that stuff about the apps/networks privacy. That’s an odd choice for an org who claim to be dedicated to privacy, so it’s a ‘thanks but no thanks’ from me.
I am still watching, and I am not saying I completely trust this app or trying to convince you to trust this app either. I am merely providing a fair example of a real anti-censorship network, compare to Twitter or FB, that’s it.
The only trusted point I can find is that they are listed on the Alchemy dapp store, which is poised to disrupt the monopoly of industry heavyweights like DappRadar. Additionally, I did not provide any personal information when registering or expose my identity within the app.
Plus, I have been doing research about decentralized structures for quite a long time, so I understand how they work and can distinguish whether WireMin is telling the truth on their FAQ page about the technology-supported logic.
But if you don’t want to take my point of view, just ignore it man.
I’m not basing my opinion on your point of view. I’m basing it on the opinion that any organisation that makes claims about strong privacy but doesn’t allow people to check their work is essentially saying ‘just trust me bro’.
I understand what you mean, man. I guess maybe they are not ready yet? That’s probably why they are not as loud as Session, even though I see some of their features are better than Session. Besides, they claim to be a small team, so…
Anyway, I hope they publish their source code asap
Some things you did not mention that caught my eye, please correct me if I misunderstood how they work:
- No servers, just P2P. Every user doubles as a server to some degree, akin to seeding
- Their one and only method to prevent bots is Proof of Work
…I personally can only really see that as cons,
- waste storage space and bandwidth on other user’s encrypted messages that have nothing to do with you
- waste computing power every time you want to send a message to anyone
(and I refuse to dismiss those as “negligible”, wasting any of that means wasting energy after all)
Not to mention abuse related issues that come with the “100% Censorship resistance”, from scams and social engineering to abusive texts to illegal content to displeasing images.
I can see an argument for some sorts of communities, but I would never consider that “a good alternative to Twitter/Facebook” in general.
If anything, their explicit, by-design lack of moderation may make it even worse for vulnerable/sensitive groups.Quoting their FAQ before anyone asks for the source:
(Security > Privacy and Data Security > Where is my data stored?)
Your data is relayed and stored in your friends’ devices and other random devices available in the network. All data is protected by strong cryptography algorithms and can be accessed only with the owner’s secret seed.
(Security > Underlying Technology > On what technology is WireMin built in?)
WireMin users jointly created an open computing platform for messaging and data storage that serves each other within the network for personal communication. WireMin protects the public resource from being abused or attacked by requiring proof-of-work, or PoW, for every message sent and each bit of data stored. A tiny piece of PoW needs to be completed by computing SHA256 hundreds of thousands of times before you can send a message. Such computing tasks can be done in less than a tenth of a second which is a negligible workload for a user device sending messages at human speed. While this introduces a significant effort for an attack to send overwhelming amounts of messages or data, the actual PoW difficulty requirement of a specific message or bit of data is proportional to its size and the duration for which it is to be stored.I think POW alone can’t prevent bots but rather spams. I understand that not having a high enough level of POW may decrease the ability to prevent spam, but let’s consider it from the user’s perspective. If WireMin has a high level of POW, that might increase CPU processing power consumption, which could harm the user’s device from no matter battery or others.
From my perspective, I think they eliminate spams in this way: User/Non-user can’t search for a specific space by name, no matter within the app or on other search engin, they have to obtain the invite-link or have someone in their WireMin contacts invite them to view or join the space.
A tip: we can always create a secret group if we don’t want all users to see the space on the discovery section (as the discovery section only shows public spaces) or to eliminate spams. For the Feed, only the owner of the feed space can post content.
I agree with you on the concern about wasting storage space and bandwidth on other users’ encrypted messages that have nothing to do with you. This is an issue that mutiple ones reported within the WireMin official chat space before.
This is my brain except it’s deciding to solve supply chain problems for work
Man, why cant they hook me up with someone, then?
why would they tho? Plus, they don’t collect your personal info man, who in the world knows who u r?
