I had a problem yesterday with the encryption of Notes between the micro.blog web interface and the Strata app, so I thought I would make a post to explain how I solved it in case it helps anyone else.

The Notes were encrypted in the Strata app but the key didn’t seem to be used in the app, so I couldn’t read them. I tried to delete the secret key from the App and replace it, but it didn’t stay deleted and reverted to the wrong one once I logged back onto the Strata app.

Then I went to the web interface and looked at the secret key I originally used to set up the encrypted Notes and saw that the one attached to the QR code in the Settings screen was not the one that had originally been used to encrypt the Notes, which I had saved earlier. This is a good reason to save the secret key! I deleted the old secret key and added the new secret key on the web interface. The next time the Notes synced with Strata App, they were properly unencrypted on-screen everywhere.

This might not be the ideal way, and it took me a while to realise this. At one point I even made a copy of each note (there were only two) and deleted the Notes and even the Notebook, before adding them back in. Obviously, the wrong secret keys were still being used, so that didn’t make any difference, and I got an error message.