Nostr is good at resisting suppression of public messages
It’s not really designed to be a great private messenger/DM architecture
I know some people were working on better DM stuff on nostr (nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn, others?)
Then there are different architectures/ideas like SimpleX, Keet, and maybe KeyChat coming soon.
What are the best DM/messaging tools today that fully open source, secure, and private?
There is not a lot of privacy if you use SimpleX or Signal with the company's default servers. The servers can see a lot of the metadata.
That is why I fundamentally think Nostr is better for DMs than anything else. The choice of the DM inbox relay here is at the forefront of the user experience.
And if you don't trust any server, you can always and easily do P2P DMs in nostr such that the messages never reach any relay.
nostr:npub1exv22uulqnmlluszc4yk92jhs2e5ajcs6mu3t00a6avzjcalj9csm7d828 servers don't see a lot of metadata, no. Maybe IP addresses.
IP + channel + date and time of messages + payload size. And if you use the same server for all your contacts (which is what everybody does) then they can see the group of channels you talk to. If both sides use the same server (which is common) the server can map IP to IP, geolocate the pair. Track IP over time and you can isolate work/home locations and from there you can know who the person is, with good probability of sucess.
I think we've discussed this before, I think IP protection is the job of another layer.
From what I remember what you have in mind you want a set of nostr relays to perform a sort of mini-Tor routing. Dunno about that how that works and whether that's not the wrong layer.
Sure, nostr could also use extra layers. But COULD doesn't matter. It's either there by default, for everybody, or it's not solved.
If you want nostr or SimpleX to solve the IP masking problem then you don't understand tech stacks. We use different solutions for different layers in our tech landscape, instead of bundling layers with apps.
