this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Privacy

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Hi,

Trying to move group chat from telegram to a more private option, but the key feature is its web interface which is so convenient...

I've checked SimpleX, Session, Briar & Element-Matrix, but the first 3 do not have a web version and the latest only has a free version for self-hosting and I haven't looked into self-hosting yet.

I'd completely understand if what I'm looking for doesn't exist for free, but if anyone has a suggestion here, I'm interested!

Cheers

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

E2EE with a server web interface is a technical impossibility. The ends are the clients. By definition the server is only there to pass encrypted data from client to client. Presumably you can make this work with a web client using the browser's local storage, but at that point you're not actually looking at a web site and you might as well just use the official app. This is one reason why Telegram doesn't do encryption by default: group chats are particularly hard to do with EE2E.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

JavaScript runs on the client. It's fairly easy to do the encryption there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

But the JS is served to the browser each time the page loads, you can't be sure it stays the same between loads. Sure, this is the same problem as malicious updates, but still exaggerated - the opportunity to slip in altered code is "every time you open the page" rather than "every update". Plus much more convenient to do targeting.

[–] refalo 2 points 2 months ago

you don't have to load the code every time, you can save it and run locally, this is exactly what the Element desktop app does, it's just an electron loader for a local copy of the website, and you can choose to update it whenever you want

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That's why I emphasized the word "server"