The hosted server is how we plan on financing development since many users will want the level of privacy it can provide, but don't have the technical expertise to manage their own environment. Over time we want to push content into a network of content hosts and P2P, but we have to promise something we can deliver as part of the Kickstarter. Our fundraising effort is more about recruiting devs than it is about raising 10K.

I see this as two separate apps though. This is probably because I already had thought about the encryption part and had a mental model of how this would work.

One is a browser extension to handle encrypted chunks of text on webpages (and some kind of key management i assume). So I post the ciphertext of my message to twitter and my friends see the plaintext while others see the ciphertext.

The second is the snippets of embeddable text hosted somewhere else (p2p, central server, etc) and an extension to auto-embed the special links to this content.

Does it make sense to combine these two ideas from the beginning? Because honestly I would volunteer my time to develop the first but have only marginal interest in the second (although it's a cool piece of tech with some interestingly weird use cases).

I can see the overlap, but I think the encryption part would be much more useful if it wasn't tied to the snippets stuff.

Am I missing something?

This concept encompasses both hosted ciphertext (on some other network) and host page ciphertext. There are use cases to both, and development of the server/network does not inhibit the development of the extensions. The road map has a set of priorities, but in the end development will proceed with the passions of Privly's contributors.

ah, so how is the meta information stored for host page ciphertext? Some sort of recognizable header/footer that the extension can scan for and choose the appropriate key?

Cool project, I'll be following closely. Nice and ambitious roadmap.