Elon Musk on Sunday introduced {that a} new model of X’s Direct Messaging (DM) characteristic, XChat, was rolling out with assist for options like vanishing messages, encryption, and the flexibility to share recordsdata, alongside its audio and video calling assist.
The brand new options aren’t but broadly out there, as XChat solely not too long ago began beta testing amongst a choose group of customers. Nevertheless, Musk mentioned that the X group expects to carry XChat to all customers someday this week, until they encounter scaling points in the course of the rollout.
In a sequence of X posts, Musk additionally famous that the up to date model of XChat has been constructed on Rust with “Bitcoin type” encryption and a “entire new structure.” It’s not clear what he means by Bitcoin-style encryption, provided that Bitcoin itself can’t be described as “encrypted.” (Bitcoin makes use of public key cryptography and signatures for its safety.)
In consequence, some are debating whether or not Musk is utilizing the terminology merely as advertising and marketing converse, if he misunderstands encryption, or if he used the incorrect phrase — maybe that means to say “cryptography” as an alternative.
The X proprietor has typically spoken of eager to make X’s DMs a challenger to encrypted platforms like Sign and iMessage. Nevertheless, calling XChat a service with solely “Bitcoin-style encryption” calls into query whether or not it’s actually a possible competitor.
As well as, Musk shared on X that XChat customers can now make audio and video calls with out a telephone quantity throughout all platforms.
Forward of this launch, X mentioned it was pausing work on encrypted DMs, presumably as a result of XChat would quickly substitute the older system.
Sadly for X customers, the service has confronted some important instability over the previous week or so, as a number of outages left customers unable to browse timelines and use different options, together with XChat.
