Discussion: What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?

Discussion topic for research post: https://vac.dev/wechat-replacement-need

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This blog is super informative - great job!

Actually, from reading this blog post, I realized a feature that WeChat doesn’t really have (or maybe it does and I don’t know where to find it). On Telegram/Messenger, you have the ability to send messages to yourself so it’s basically a chat with yourself - acting as a personal “storage” of your own messages so you can refer to it in the future. From the previous Waku posts, it seems like it should be possible to “send” a message in the p2p network with the sender and receiver as yourself? Even so, with the mail-server setup, the actual messages would disappear after 30 days? Is this the reason that Status is looking into decentralized caching?

Thanks!

On the protocol layer you can send a message to yourself with Waku, and we use this for pairing devices belonging to one user (https://specs.status.im/spec/5#pairing). In the Status app this is currently not exposed in the UI - I agree it’d be great - see issue here: https://github.com/status-im/status-react/issues/10318

Cached for 30 days or so: Correct. That is one reason, another is to incentivize infrastructure and use for attachments, Ethereum state, etc.

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I see. That completely makes sense. Thanks for the clear explanation @oskarth! :smiley: