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France went with a Matrix/Riot.im public fork/derivative as their government encrypted messenger app. Why reinvent the wheel, when this is something that works at scale?

Un-AC bump with links.

It's time to abandon proprietary IM services and start using Matrix. The most popular client/server is Riot but you can run your own server and use different clients if you like.

Unlike all the different services competing in this space, Matrix is objectively the best. One of the biggest reasons is that it is federated. Like Google Talk was when it was a proper XMPP server back in the day.

Don't fall for another big on hype low on substance service like Signal, which is just as centralized as Hangouts and could one day be ruined just as Google Talk/Hangouts was.

Use something that is fully open source, fully federated, and built to last. Use Matrix.

> What we need to do is design a portocol/service

Enter the matrix.

The matrix.org protocol is exactly that.

- they will offer a secure collection of apps, as part of the Matrix ecosystem

Hmm, the fact that the matrix webpage has this prominently displayed makes me wonder about their long term viability:

Matrix Needs Your Support!
UPDATE: The situation has changed and our need is more urgent even than before.
Matrix needs you! We are facing a funding crisis.

Fingers crossed with you. But to address the points you raised:

1) You must have apps people want.

They are addressing that. From another post I made on this story:

- they are offering developer's kits for a donation of $299, to be delivered June 2018
- their PureOS platform will ship initially with basic apps (phone, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing) with others to follow
- they will offer a secure collection of apps, as part of the Matrix ecosystem
- they have added a stretch-goal to support Android apps in an isolation layer

An obvious goal will be the necessity to somehow support Android/Google apps. And an emulation/isolation layer to do so is certainly technologically possible.

See above re "stretch" goals.

It is even exciting to think about a device that might run quality non-Android Linux apps AND run Android apps in an isolated environment, denying it access to personal stuff, and/or feeding it fake data when wanted.

Check. Again, see above. Per the link in TFS, the phone "[r]uns PureOS by default, can run most GNU+Linux distributions." The openness in the dev environment ensures that the kind of privacy and security you're talking about can be baked in.

But there are a lot of legal and monopolistic minefields in trying to do so.

Such as?

And trying to keep it compatible over time would be a big, big hurdle; especially on a tight budget with little resources.

Well, Gnu/Linux has fared rather well under similar circumstances.

You're a bit hasty, expecting an app store for a phone that hasn't even shipped yet. But if you examine the link in TFA, you'll see the following:

- they are offering developer's kits for a donation of $299, to be delivered June 2018
- their PureOS platform will ship initially with basic apps (phone, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing) with others to follow
- they will offer a secure collection of apps, as part of the Matrix ecosystem
- they have added a stretch-goal to support Android apps in an isolation layer

Check out matrix.org. It is not only a rich IM solution with all the bells and whistles, including multi-devices end-to-end encryption, but Matrix also provides for bridges and proxies to other networks, so that it can be used to unify communication.

It's only 2.5 years old but has already come quite a way!

https://matrix.org/

Every programming language implementation eventually includes a half-baked lisp implementation, every non-instant messaging implementation eventually becomes a half-baked version of SMTP, and every instant messaging implementation becomes a half-baked version of IRC.

Rather than starting over, it would make more sense to extend what we have. For instance, the medical field has a goal of eliminating spam and insecure transmission of medical information by creating the Direct Project, a network of curated SMTP servers with a pool of trusted certificates, who are contractually required to only create accounts for people whose identities are known to be in an appropriate medical field. Delivery confirmation is mandatory, as is end-to-end S/MIME encryption. To support the latter, there are number of different methods for locating a destination provider's address and certificate. (Then they applied a ridiculous amount of violence, sorry... XML and SOAP to the damn thing, but at least their intentions were good)

Likewise, Matrix is basically IRC (the canonical pubsub implementation) with a number of added features like federation, decentralized message storage, encryption, and so on.

Check out https://matrix.org/ -- might just be what you're looking for, looks very promising so far...!

Check out https://matrix.org/ -- federated, open source, open spec. it's still being actively developed, but from what I've seen so far it's looking really solid, and seems like a good development community, too... End-to-end encryption isn't yet finalized, but it's said to be coming soon...

Or a Thunderbird local server unified messaging platform using Firefox as the client (my proposal): http://pdfernhout.net/thunderb...

Mozilla rejected my application to do that project the very next day after I sent it. The rejected a related proposal by me a couple years earlier to improve Thunderbird desktop. From an earlier poster who works at Mozilla, I now understand that situation better. I had not realized how dysfunctional the organization had become.

That Thunderbird server project is currently on hiatus as I just started a new job, but I still hope I can do some bits and pieces of that idea of a FOSS messaging platform now and then that might someday add up to it.

Meanwhile, a proprietary Slack is eating the free/standard messaging sphere: http://pdfernhout.net/reasons-...

One year of Mozilla's revenues is about the same as all the VC money that has gone into Slack. Meanwhile the Mozilla CEO says essentially that FOSS messaging tools like Thunderbird do not matter any more and kisses off Thunderbird. To my mind, at this point, Thunderbird is the more viable concept compared to Firefox (let alone any of the other ill-considered projects) -- as the success of Slack shows.

I can be thankful for Mattermost and Matrix.org as free Slack alternatives.
http://www.mattermost.org/
http://matrix.org/

But imagine what such FOSS messaging software could be like with hundreds of millions of dollars a year behind it to fund a team of thousands of full-time developers.

Bottom line: Mozilla is pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars a year of money (and thousands of developer years) that should be earmarked for essential FOSS (like communications tools) on projects with near zero chance of success(a new mobile OS?) or that are unneeded (yet another programming language?) -- while paying huge executive salaries.