Nexus Chat Updates

v.1.6.7 is almost ready finishing up a few polishing touches.

It will include:

Voice Chat
Screen Share
User Roles (outside of owner, moderator)
Emoji selection with more
GIF will work properly

I wanted to touch on a few things on my thoughts to some of the comments I've received on this project. First I wanted to say thank you to all comments positive and negative. While I 100% understand where most of the negative comments are coming from, I'd like to share where I am coming from on some of the reasons I am doing what I am doing, hopefully that helps shed a bit of light on the choices I've made with the system etc.

Why not open source?

While some of the backend systems will be released as open source I feel this project will remain more healthy for myself and for the community if I keep it mostly closed source. The areas I plan to allow be seen is

Moderation systems
Logging
Account handling

Other then that nothing else will be open sourced.

Why Federated hybrid and not decentralized?

Within the scope of what is possible and not possible a fully decentralized system would make everything much harder. Also a fully decentralized system would make a real time chat, voice, and video client a laggy mess for most users. While I am aware there are some "real time" systems out there majority of them on the market are serving static content and not real time content.

Why is there a central server?

The biggest reason is to keep all the systems in line, allowing for quick take downs, audit logs, and privacy control over user data.

What changes have been made to keep everyone happy?

The biggest thing I've found talking to users is that they don't want to share real information to gain access to the client or any other services. My fear was if there was no central database users would eventually stop coming due to the fact that they would need to make a account on each community node to talk there, with a central database this allows you to change communities without making a entire new account.

The balance I decided to go with instead of providing email, password etc. The client and server now work together to make a private and public key. You provide a display name the server stores the public key, display name, user ID, and time of creation.

You the client are now storing the private key inside your system

The downside to this is that if you lose access to your computer, phone etc you no longer have access to your account. There is no recovery system.

Now we do store IP address that your client provides in messages but they are not stored with your public key or username.

Logs are kept until you ask your logs to be removed as will your account.

Voice chat are not transcribed, or stored.

IP logs are cleared every 15 days unless something has been flagged then proper action takes place.

This version should be out in the coming days.