Bit of an odd intro: I’m a carpenter, 42 years at the bench. I’m the type who can’t stand making the same thing everyone else makes, so I’ve always chased the technical side too - CNC, laser cutting, and lately building software to run my machines.
At some point I wanted to send my own designs to people without them leaking anywhere, and I went down the rabbit hole of how messaging actually works. What got me was realising how much of the “free” stuff is paid for with our privacy. That annoyed me enough that I decided to build my own messenger, mostly to learn. It grew from something simple into a real thing. I called it Sherlock.
Two things I cared about: proper encryption, and NOT tying it to a phone number - I built a different system for that.
I’m not going to pretend I reinvented cryptography. I’m a woodworker who got obsessed. So I’d rather hear it straight from people who actually know this stuff:
- How much does the “no phone number” approach really buy you if I get the rest wrong?
- For a small independent project, what’s the bar before any of you would even consider trusting it - open source, audit, something else?
Genuinely here for the criticism, not the pats on the back.
That’s the clearest answer I could’ve asked for, thank you - so the order is: audit is the thing that actually counts, open source is necessary but not sufficient on its own. That reframes my priorities, and honestly it’s a bit sobering in a good way.
And I really appreciate you sharing the course takeaway, because that’s the part that lands. “There are many subtle ways to get it wrong even with a trusted library” is exactly the fear I should have and sometimes talk myself out of. The fact that someone who actually studied this concluded “don’t do it solo for serious use without expert review” is worth more to me than any feature I could add.
So I’m taking this as: keep building and learning, be honest that it’s not for high-stakes use until it’s been properly reviewed, and treat the audit as the real gate rather than a nice-to-have. I’d rather say that out loud than oversell it to someone who actually needs the protection.
And thanks for the XMPP explanation - the email-style federated ID is genuinely elegant for the no-phone-number problem. Going to study how OMEMO handles the key exchange on top of that.