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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

That’s because group chat in an encrypted messenger with good ux is an unsolved cryptographic research problem. Everyone else just punts on it.

I get why that’s unsatisfying from the user perspective, but it’s absolutely necessary from the perspective of maintaining user trust over time. Signal has a plan to fix it but we’ll have to see if they can actually implement their new groups solution.

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What? No it’s not an unsolved crypto research problem. Signal supports group chats just fine, it’s just that’s it’s hidden away behind a couple extra clicks and you have to name them that inordinately annoys me compared to imessage where you just type the recipients out all in one place. It makes it feel like you’re Setting Up A Group instead of just bullshitting with friends.

You misunderstand this problem. Doing group chat where you do a massive rekeying of all participants every time someone joins doesn’t scale, but it is secure. Signal doesn’t practically support large groups like Telegram does (although telegram is unencrypted as a result).

I can assure you that large secure groups with strong cryptographic guarantees and evolving membership lists is unsolved.

Nah, you misunderstand the complaint. The UX is annoying if you just want to message your friends Alice and Bob. On other platforms it's trivial. On those, you type alice into the new message bar, click her contact, type bob into the address bar, click his contact, then write your message and hit send. On signal, you have to create a new group first.

I'm not talking about wanting to make the kinds of groups with dynamic membership like you're talking about.

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