Many people fall under the illusion that because a company markets their app as "private" or uses fancy buzzwords like "end-to-end encryption" or "secure" that it is what was promised. We have found time and time again that these are blatant lies to ultimately and immorally grow their userbase and hopes at quicker financial success. Understand some of the degrees of privacy that actually make apps private. There are degrees of privacy as there are degrees of decentralization and just about everything. In this infographic by Formless Labs it breaks down degrees of privacy for messenger apps on each column: - Decentralized - Metadata Privacy - No KYC - Group E2EE - Self Hosting Obvious benefits many people enjoy are also no advertisements and the fact that apps are free (and hopefully open-source). Any suggestions on other fields or degrees of privacy that should be added? Let us know!

Thank you for the feature in 's Substack! Many other great developments in the Nostr ecosystem that are covered in this weekly update. Vector is already on v0.3.2, so be sure to update if you are currently on v0.3.1. Download The Latest: https://github.com/VectorPrivacy/Vector/releases/tag/v0.3.2 https://nomishka.substack.com/i/189590414/7-vector-v031

We've sent our first Pull Request to NostrApps.com using GitWorkshop.Dev! Nostr is the way. https://gitworkshop.dev//nostrapps-com/prs/note1lm8yutcssrshnt5tm7dt6aehe5j9pzvflg93gl7zx50tr9gf7wysx7t708

🟢 [ V E C T O R ] Open Beta v0.3.1 We've just rolled out the latest version of Vector, including a lot of UX optimizations for group chats, performance, file sharing, emojis, and many improvements for Android (notifications fixed). Check it out on GitHub or read more below: https://github.com/VectorPrivacy/Vector/releases/tag/v0.3.1 New: 👥 Group Management: multi-admin, edit group info, bulk invites, invite-by-npub, group avatars, and many fixes 🔔 Android Notifications: background message sync with Mark Read and inline Reply actions 📡 Multiplayer Networking Upgrade: faster connections, seamless WiFi + cellular switching, and Android connectivity fixes 🎙️ Voice-to-Text AI: rebuilt speech-to-text with GPU acceleration on Android 📁 File Attachment Overhaul: styled download boxes with progress spinners and retry states 📦 Directory Zip & Send: compress and send entire folders with live progress and file tree preview 🔒 Customizable Encryption: encrypt Vector with a PIN, Password, or go passwordless with instant logins 🔄 Deterministic Sync: Vector now syncs your entire history, including missing messages, at ultrafast speeds (negentropy!) 😀 Emoji Upgrade: Vector supports the very latest Unicode, with a library of over 2,000 emojis 📬 Smarter DM Delivery: messages now route to the recipient's preferred relays, for those with custom relay setups 🤖 32-bit ARM on Android: added support for older Android devices (typically 32-bit ARM) 🎮 Mini App Update Badges: one-tap in-panel updating when newer versions are available Improvements: ⚡ Performance Overhaul: faster boot, image processing, and audio - up to >15x speedup across the board 🗜️ Smaller & Faster App: >33% smaller install size and ~50% smaller frontend (we shrunk!) 🖼️ New Image Placeholders: sharper, faster (12x) previews while photos load - powered by our custom Thumbhash library 🧠 Memory Optimizations: lower RAM usage across the board (especially for high message & contact counts) 🏗️ Background Sync: restructured backend enables reliable background sync on Android 🎨 UI Polish: updated themes, chat backgrounds, settings layout, popup styling, and profile display Fixes: 🔄 Group Reliability: improved message delivery with smarter relay handling, retry logic, and safer commit handling 🤙 Emoji Panel Performance: fixed freezing and jitter when opening the emoji panel 🍎 macOS White Flash: no more white flash on app startup (we improved Tauri to do this!) 📱 Android Media: video and audio seeking now works correctly, with stream-based seeking in a custom media backend 🔧 Upgrade Safety: fixed migration bug affecting some users upgrading from v0.2.3, extending backward-compat

Optimizers gonna optimize. Want faster audio transcriptions? You got it. ✅ We've now been able to improve the transcription time by approximately 500%. The most important factor is that people who are using slower and older devices still have access to the same resources and features on Vector. You can expect these optimizations and features available on the next release for v0.3.1 and that includes you, Android users.

We have just open-sourced "fast-thumbhash", a library that produces beautiful image preview thumbnails with significant advantages over BlurHash; more detail, 12x faster, 10% smaller. More data in fewer characters. fast-thumbhash is a from-scratch ThumbHash encoder/decoder that beats BlurHash on every axis. Below are 4 key points that compare this release of ThumbHash compared to its predecessor, BlurHash. 🟢 12x faster encoding and decoding (14 µs vs 180 µs) 🟢 Smaller on the wire: 26 chars base91 vs BlurHash's 28 chars base83 🟢 Richer data: alpha channel, embedded aspect ratio, full DCT L/P/Q/A vs BlurHash's 4x3 RGB grid 🟢 Better visual fidelity: more detail, better color accuracy, transparency support Over 10,000 images sent on Nostr: - BlurHash: 28 chars × 10k = 280 KB of placeholder data - ThumbHash (base91): 26 chars × 10k = 260 KB of placeholder data - 7.1% reduction (20 KB saved) — while encoding strictly more information per hash (alpha, aspect ratio, full DCT channels) This will also be integrated and available in Vector Messenger. You will be able to test it out yourself in the next release, v0.3.1. Attached is an image preview of what it will look like inside of the Vector GUI. We encourage transitioning to fast-thumbhash to maintain full unanimity of Marmot clients on our provably higher fidelity, faster and Nostr-optimised library https://github.com/marmot-protocol/mdk/pull/195