The creators of the alternative social network Minds have launched a new feature-rich, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging app – Minds Chat.
“This product is a major milestone for Minds and takes us all a giant leap ahead with regards to providing decentralized tools that respect your privacy and freedom,” Minds said.
Minds Chat uses the open source, decentralized Matrix protocol which provides several privacy-enhance features including:
- End-to-end encryption (a technology that prevents third-party snooping and ensures that only you and the person you’re chatting with can see the message contents)
- Cross-signed device verification (a technology that allows each user to verify their chat sessions and prove it’s really them)
- Self-hosting (which lets you have full ownership and control of your data by hosting it on any server you choose)
Minds Chat also supports chat session management, lets you backup your encryption keys, and has the option to manually verify each session for additional security.
Minds Chat supports text, voice, and video chats and you can chat one-to-one or as part of a group. All chats support file sharing and video chats support screen sharing.
You can browse all the publicly available rooms (group chats) via an in-app search. If you want to create your own room, there are lots of customization options that let you decide whether it’s public, who has access to the room, who has admin privileges, and more.
Since Minds Chat is integrated with the Minds social network, you can use your Minds account to sign up for Minds Chat and then use the same username on both services. Notifications from Minds Chat are also displayed in the “Chat” section of Minds.
Minds is one of the many services that Minds Chat can be integrated. The Matrix protocol can connect to a wide range of online collaboration, messaging, and social apps including Slack as well as bots and widgets.
Minds Chat also has a highly customizable notifications system. You can choose whether to receive notifications based on a wide range of criteria such as whether they contain your username, specific keywords, invites to a room, invites to a call, and more. In addition to this, you can decide whether you want to receive notifications on a room-by-room basis.
Other features include dark mode, custom font sizes and styles, custom on-screen shortcuts, custom composer settings, and custom chat display options, and keyboard shortcuts.
Currently, Minds is available on the web and Android (via the Google Play Store or an Android Application Package (APK). The iOS app will be coming soon.
