I'm one of those people, but for a discord alternative, I think it's a pretty fair trade off. My WhatsApp groups are mostly under 100 people while discord servers get much, much bigger. The only thing I feel like would be viable would be one shared encryption key for large rooms that just gets shared between the members via a resource-intensive diffie-helman-like message once and then after that everyone just uses the same key.
> The only thing I feel like would be viable would be one shared encryption key for large rooms that just gets shared between the members via a resource-intensive diffie-helman-like message once and then after that everyone just uses the same key.
I agree on that extent. I find Telegram on this grey area which people recommend it as an alternative to Signal or WhatsApp (these people ask for group e2e) and at the same time many communities use Telegram channels and groups as alternatives/complementary to Discord. An app as Telegram is not going to please the majority and maybe this could be the case for Revolt.
Is there a group of people who use WhatsApp who care about e2e encryption and hold it as the standard? Surely its common knowledge that you cannot trust the parent company of WhatsApp, or its encryption since being broken.
500 isn't really asking for much, Signal does up to 1,000 in a group using standard direct messaging encryption (client side fanout). Whatsapp uses a shared hash ratchet and just spins up new keys when someone leaves, this allows it to do 10,000.
Discord gets to 25,000 active users before they move to throwing resources at the problem for a hard max of 500,000 total users able to join (but not be active at once, that number is a little fluffy) so it doesn't seem e2ee is really slamming the breaks on scaling vs how far you could normally get.
Finally if you allow tying and verifying to real world identity and don't require forward secrecy then the encryption side of the problem is no more difficult than PGP.
I probably wasn't as clear as I could have been on that. The Discord numbers were meant to provide a point of comparison on how little e2ee really impacts scaling active users vs a traditional system but I wasn't very explicit that's why it was being mentioned.