I worked out this was odd behavior on my OPNSense firewall NAT rules.

For some reason some syncing worked (eg. beehaw.org) but new connections failed. I’m not sure why. Maybe established sessions were kept alive.

Those rules haven’t changed in months and months, so I’ll chalk that up to “weirdness”.

Yeah, I’ve tried that a couple of times too.

And run through all the federation troubleshooting steps in the docs.

I thought that, and in the past I’ve been off for a day or two and always caught up.

This time I haven’t and it’s been a week or two since coming back online.

Given this is !privacy and the advertise as front page features both “works will all your messaging apps” and “end to end encryption”, it seems important to flag currently those aren’t mutually compatible.

It’s not their fault the apps don’t have e2e APIs, it’s a tough problem, but the secrecy and privacy guarantee is just “trust us to stick to our policy”. And they’re a start-up, tooling isn’t perfect (or even exist), mistakes happen, etc

Their self-hosting looks interesting, but then it said to use your own clients too, which took the fun out of that.

“For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the Beeper web service, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp’s proprietary encryption protocol.”

So, not really end to end for most common use-cases.

I really don’t like the “but otherwise we’d need a warrant” approach.

Yes, of course you should need a warrant. That’s the bit that’s the safeguard and actually is the checks and balance against abuse. It’s not a problem to be optimized away.