### #Amethyst v0.73.1-alpha: New Private Message & Small Groups Protocol

This is an **alpha** release of the new GiftWrapped DMs. Please do not consider anything to be actually private until we have a **stable** version. This is early and there might be bugs that leak information.

You can activate this mode by clicking on the Incognito icon on the Chat screen. For now, only Amethyst supports this NIP. Thus we recommend only testing with other Amethyst users. Coracle and 0xChat are finishing their implementations in the upcoming days/weeks.

The claims of this new method are:

- Messages are encrypted with a superior XChaCha algorithm to each participant's public key individually.

- Chat participant identities, each message's real date and time, event kinds, and other tags are all hidden from the public.

- Senders and receivers cannot be linked with public information alone.

- Minimal trust in counterparties: Counterparties cannot expose verifiable details of your message, including the metadata, without exposing their entire user and all of their other messages (private key)

- There is no central queue, channel or otherwise converging event id to link or count all messages in the same group.

- There is no moderation role (i.e. no group admins, no invitations or bans)

- There is no chatroom secret that can leak or be mistakenly shared

- Messages can be fully recoverable in any client (that implements NIP-24) with the receiver or the sender's private key

- The protocol's messages can flow through public relays without loss of privacy. Private relays can increase privacy further, but they are not needed.

- The protocol is extensible to make any other event kind fully private (private likes, private reports, private long-form content, etc)

This implementation is very similar to how Slack manages direct DMs to multiple users. If three users are having a conversation and want to add a fourth person, the forth's user will not see the past. This guarantees maximum privacy: only the receivers of a message at the time of writing will ever be able to decrypt it.

In the near future, we will implement Forward Secrecy through:

- Users will be able to opt-in for "Disappearing Messages" that are not recoverable with their private key

- Users will be able to also opt-in to sharing messages with a new key exclusive for DM backup and recovery.

Details:

- Support for NIP-24 Private Messages and Small Groups

- Support for NIP-59 Gift Wraps & Seals

- Support for NIP-44 Versioned Encrypted Payloads

- Support for XChaCha encryption algorithm

- Fix: Loading of Alby's NWC URI

- Fix: Only requests notification permission once.

- Fix: Show reposts and reactions in search