Building an end-to-end encrypted social network

Everyone wants to do better at keeping in touch with close friends and family. In a recent survey, 95% of respondents told us that they wished they could share more often than they do. We asked why people don't share more with the people closest to them, and two responses dominated the answers: (1) Concern over who can see what they share, and (2) Not wanting to inconvenience the receiving party. These answers reflect the limitations of our current tools. We can either have security and privacy, as with encrypted messengers like Signal and Element/Matrix, or we can have the convenience of the big social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. I wanted both, so I built something new. My new app is called Circles, and it's built on the Matrix platform for end-to-end encrypted messaging. It uses Matrix's encrypted chat rooms behind the scenes to recreate the social structures and user interface of a typical social networking app. I'll talk about how we use Matrix to implement two types of social structures in an E2E encrypted, privacy preserving way: private groups and social circles.