Elon Musk on Sunday announced {that a} new model of X’s Direct Messaging (DM) function, XChat, was rolling out with help for options like vanishing messages, encryption, and the flexibility to share recordsdata, alongside its audio and video calling help.
The brand new options aren’t but broadly obtainable, as XChat only recently started beta testing amongst a choose group of customers. Nonetheless, Musk mentioned that the X workforce expects to convey XChat to all customers someday this week, except they encounter scaling points through the rollout.
In a sequence of X posts, Musk additionally noted 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 cannot be described as “encrypted.” (Bitcoin makes use of public key cryptography and signatures for its safety.)
Because of this, some are debating whether Musk is utilizing the terminology merely as advertising and marketing communicate, if he misunderstands encryption, or if he used the improper phrase — maybe which means to say “cryptography” as a substitute.
The X proprietor has often spoken of desirous to make X’s DMs a challenger to encrypted platforms like Sign and iMessage. Nonetheless, 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 and not using 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 exchange 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.