Has anyone made a DMs-only fediverse client? Like something that looks more or less like iMessage or Signal but you address people via their fediverse handles and it handles DMs as first class (and only-class) content?
Has anyone made a DMs-only fediverse *server*? Like if I want to join fedi but only to direct message people and be in group chats I could join a server and it would have a nice client view like the one in the previous paragraph?
I'm thinking no discovery of topics or people. No hashtag support. None of that shit. Basically just email-over-activitypub. You give it addresses for people you want to talk to and then it happens. Just like with phone numbers and SMS/MMS. Make it e2e encrypted if you like, or not.
The difference from email is I could have my nice iMessage like experience over here, and you can be stuck in Mastodon DM user experience hell on your end if you so choose. Choice!
If you went the e2e route in the current ecosystem you'd have some kind of Signal-style lock-in where you'd need people running the same client on both ends, but you'd be bouncing around encrypted messages via activitypub, I guess? idk. just spitballin here people
@darius Mastodon actually used to have API endpoints for E2EE messaging https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 which has been dropped due to the lack of clients: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/14283. It maybe worthwhile looking into the code for how it looked like. (I'm afraid I'm not an expert :P