Wired says Musk’s XChat looks less like a serious Signal-style messenger and more like another messy Facebook Messenger clone bolted onto X.
The “bolted onto the social app” bit is what would put me off. Your DMs end up feeling like just another engagement surface, not a place you can trust to be boring and private.
UI vibe matters here. When your chat lives inside a feed app, you start getting all the “helpful” stuff (contact suggestions, message requests, weird ranking), and it stops feeling like a dumb pipe.
Yeah, the “social inbox” vibe is the tell here. Once chat lives inside a feed product, the defaults drift toward retention (read receipts, typing, “seen by”), and even if they ship E2EE, the pressure to add “helpful” surfaces later tends to carve little exceptions into what should be a dumb pipe. Do we actually know what XChat supports today for disappearing messages / screenshot warnings / metadata minimization, or is it just “trust us, it’s encrypted”? Tiny practical snippet: if they won’t let you turn off engagement-y signals per chat, that’s basically the product thesis showing through.```
// pseudo-settings check: can you disable “social” signals per conversation?
await xchat.setChatPrefs(chatId, {
readReceipts: false,
typingIndicators: false,
lastSeen: false,
disappearAfterSeconds: 3600,
});
Look — “it’s encrypted” doesn’t mean much if they’re still hoovering up who you talk to, when, and how often, because that’s the whole fuel for a feed product.
If XChat won’t let you kill read receipts/typing/last-seen per conversation (and set disappearing messages without jumping through hoops), I’d assume the priorities are retention first and “secure chat” as a marketing layer.
