Former Signal engineers have published Encrypted Spaces, an open-source framework for building collaboration tools that are private by design.
The project gives developers the cryptographic building blocks to construct apps with features comparable to Slack channels, Discord servers, or shared Google Docs - without the operator being able to read user content. Unlike Signal the app, Encrypted Spaces is infrastructure: protocols and libraries other developers can build on top of. The team has not named a specific first product built on it; the release is the foundation, not a finished house.
Every major collaboration platform today is encrypted in transit but readable by the provider. That gap matters because enterprise data, legal communications, and sensitive organizational work all flow through tools whose operators could hand content to governments or expose it in a breach. A credible open-source toolkit lowers the barrier for developers who want to build tools where even the platform itself cannot surveil its users.
The harder problem has never been the cryptography - it is switching costs. Keybase tried a version of this and ended up absorbed by Zoom; Matrix and Element exist and mostly serve security-conscious niches. "Built by Signal alumni" carries real credibility, but it is not the same thing as Signal's distribution.