Ideally the concept of a thread would be some loose and dynamic thing decided by individual posters. For example, I send a message to fifty of my friends talking about a certain topic. Later I get a message from someone else talking about the same subject with 50 other people. To aide in my own organization of information, I merge the two threads together into one, but a response to a message from one thread only goes to the people who started participating in that thread to begin with. The different posts could be color coded based on which base thread they are a part of, although if somebody is part of both it would be problematic. We could have a color that represents a person who is part of every base thread, but then it is still problematic if there are three base threads and a person is only part of two of them. What if we want to merge the thread into a single base thread where everybody can see the entire discussion? How would that be managed? We probably shouldn't let Alice decide that Bob should see a message Carol sent her, even if Alice and Bob and Alice and Carol are talking about a similar topic. Maybe Carol can mark her posts as 'open' or 'private' and an open post could be merged by Alice into a conversation with Bob and all of the history of the thread becomes available to all participants. But a private message is marked as something that someone only wants viewable by the people they selected to view it, ever. Or maybe there can be some other system that decides this. These details are largely not to do with the underlying cryptography of the system. A lot of them are GUI problems (how do we represent the interweaved threads? color coded posts?). A lot of them are organizational problems. Most of them are higher level issues that don't need to be worried about a whole lot until we have the fundamental cryptographic components taken care of. But they are still important and substantially unanswered problems. Right now a few people are working on coding a system like this with me. I think we should go public with the code that is already done and show it to people here, and invite people like Astor, SS, ECC_ROT13 etc to participate and audit what is done. We still have unanswered questions, we still have parts to code. Would anybody be interested in seeing the code that is done so far and helping contribute to the project in an organized fashion? What we are working on is not illegal and is not being built for illegal communities, it is merely software for use by those who like the features. But I personally see nothing wrong with including people from this forum, although some others working on it may be hesitant for it to have any apparent connection to illegal activity (because why make something that is not illegal linked to criminals). Unfortunately I already kind of fucked that up by being involved with it and having the original idea for it .