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Quiet – Encrypted P2P team chat with no servers, just Tor
- GauntletWizard 3y agoYour selling points are the opposite of Discord and Slack's selling points. Slack login is entirely corporate controlled. Discord just works with one login across communities. These products are not popular in spite of their terrible privacy patterns, they are popular because of characteristics that intrinsically have terrible privacy patterns.
- colordrops 3y agoWould should people who want to have productive group chat with privacy use then?
- rakoo 3y agoAny client/server based app for a company-controlled replacementt The server manages rights and auth. Anything that accept OIDC or is federated for the second. Matrix doesn't totally fit the bill yet, but zulip does, so that's what you should install. But the one that surprisingly seems to be the best is probably email. We don't have the proper MUAs yet, but deltachat (https://delta.chat https://delta.chat) shows that there is no reason for us to be limited to decades-old paradigms and should reinvent ourselves.
- komali2 3y agoWhat is a MUA? All results consider it "makeup artist."
- rakoo 3y ago"Mail User Agent". The name is a parallel to browsers who also are called "User Agents"
- komali2 3y agoThanks. Offtopic, but this is the second time in a week the person who answered my question gets downvoted (if that's what the reduction in contrast of your post indicates). I'm not sure why that's happening.
- _8j50 3y agoWhy can't the login be corporate controlled for Quiet?
- jona-f 3y agoI think they are aware. Let the corporate crapsters do their thing and let us have our thing. To me, a community that relies on discord or slack is a red flag. I would really like something like this to become the default instead. Long live irc!
- hardware2win 3y agoIrc? That privacy nightmare giving IPs?
- Bu9818 3y agoYou can hide it from other users by using a cloak (which some servers enforce on all connections), if that's a concern (but I don't think it's much of a concern). If you want some anonymity from both the server and users you're probably already connecting to the server from Tor (or maybe a VPN if it's blocked). OTOH discord is difficult/impossible to use from Tor Browser due to phone number requirements on suspicious connections and email verification when changing countries, which sucks.
- jona-f 3y agoYes, and on top of that i don't have to use a javascript enabled browser or some proprietary app, instead i can chose between many minimal and foss irc clients.
- hardware2win 3y agoDiscord is centralized which makes it safer than self hosted solutions
- mrusme 3y agoLastPass is centralized, which makes it safer than self-hosted sol.. oh, well, never mind. :-)
- hardware2win 3y ago
- hanniabu 3y agoI'm surprised there's no direct messages yet, I would think that'd be a trivial step from group chat
- _8j50 3y agoProbably like Matrix where a DM is a chatroom but only one person invited so far.
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) The non-trivial thing about DMs is multiple device support, so that when someone sends you an encrypted DM you will receive it on any of your devices. We've also been prioritizing basic functionality on Android and iOS over many common-sense features like DMs because there is a lot of risk there. All users we talk to need reliable mobile support, so we want to ensure we have that locked down to a sufficient degree before adding a bunch of features (to be a bit melodramatic, we want to make sure we aren't polishing deckchairs on a Titanic!) But we have a concrete plan for encrypted group messaging with multiple device support and removal. We plan on using this library: https://github.com/local-first-web/auth https://github.com/local-first-web/auth It is very bleeding edge but is based on academic work by Martin Kleppmann and built in conjunction with the folks at Ink & Switch, so it's an earnest attempt at a solution. We'd love to use MLS but it's too complex and narrowly focused, I think, to be a good fit at this stage.
- hanniabu 3y agoMakes sense, thanks for the context
- jstanley 3y agoThis sounds like a much more polished alternative to Ricochet: https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet
- holmesworcester 3y agoYes! It's basically ricochet plus group chat and async messaging! Ricochet was a huge inspiration for us.
- lordofgibbons 3y agoAs far as I know, there is no way to run IPFS over Tor. It also says it relies on OrbitDB, which runs on the IPFS, but IPFS has to run on clearnet, and when the user accesses a content, then an observer can see what content they fetched because their node will broadcast it. I feel like I'm missing a piece here.. The Readme also says Tor2web is used to share files. I'm not familiar with this, but wouldn't that require the user to trust the entities who run these servers to not snoop on their traffic before it enters the Tor network?
- jeroenhd 3y agoTor can tunnel any protocol, including IPFS. The normal IPFS network and the Tor IPFS network can't really interface without nodes bridging the gap by speaking both protocols. There are a few PoCs out there for adding Tor support to IPFS. Tor2web makes the claims a little suspicious, but technically speaking the system could work. Now that Veilid is out (https://veilid.com/ https://veilid.com/), that seems like a much better base to build a messenger on top of, but it probably doesn't support the IPFS features this thing requires. Maybe a v2 can use it to get the privacy features it needs.
- AceLewis 3y agoTor works on top of TCP so it can’t tunnel UDP traffic. Lots of P2P things (like torrents) support both UDP and TCP, some only UDP. If you try to torrent and only have TCP you won’t be able to connect to other peers using UDP.
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) IPFS can actually run quite well over Tor, and you don't have to use IPFS on a big global network for it to be useful. We've modified the libp2p WebSocket transport to connect exclusively over Tor to Tor onion services, and we give every Quiet community (like a Discord "server" or Slack workspace) their own IPFS network. Since Tor v3 onion addresses are unguessable, this creates a nice outer security boundary around each community. As others in the thread have pointed out, the disadvantage of not using a global IPFS network with "pinning services" etc. is that if no one else in your specific community is online, asynchronous message delivery will be disrupted. That said, I believe the privacy benefits are well-worth it. IPFS is also much more performant when running on networks of a few hundred or thousand users, as opposed to the big global network, so that's another nice thing about the approach we've taken, in addition to the privacy benefits.
- snowram 3y agoA chat platform with only textual chat and file sharing isn't an alternative to Discord nor Slack. It is barely a slightly better version of IRC. Unfortunately many messaging softwares seem to not understand what feature parity is.
- busssard 3y agoIts an opensource project. Instead of complaining, why dont you implement it? ;)
- hnarn 3y agoCompletely beside the point. The comment you’re replying to was simply questioning the headline.
- j_maffe 3y agoOP implies that the devs were the ones who wrote the headline though. They clearly stated that it is not (yet) a sound alternative to Discord.
- plastic_bag 3y agoThe About section of the repo literally says "A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS ". So the dev(s) are indeed claiming it's an alternative to both Slack and Discord.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qabqabaca 3y agoHe’s not complaining about it missing the features he wants, he’s complaining about it missing features of the products it’s presenting itself as an alternative to
- derelicta 3y agoAs much as I hate to say that, they are right. If you want to be a significant competitor to centralized plateforms, you gotta at least do as much at them.
- kkfx 3y agoMh, XMPP is well known, open, far lighter than IPFS... Why the hell I'd want a MONSTER software just to chat knowing that "real security" of such giants is far theoretical since they are so big that their knowability is limited for anyone and attack surface is enormous? Dear devs I know some tech are trendy, but please focus on good tech, not monsters. For socials we have Usenet, today antispam can handle the task, and the rest while from another era works well enough. For chat we have IRC and XMPP, with the latter far more modern, featuresful and still simple enough, we have mails. Sharing files is still complex but syncthing works for mere exchange, ZeroNet is good enough for simple distributed web. We have enough crappy monsters from the commercial big tech world to add others.
- jstanley 3y agoIn what way is ipfs a monster? It is a single go binary that does a tiny number of jobs.
- Grimburger 3y agoClient side compute for other random people is probably what GP is talking about here.
- jstanley 3y agoIPFS doesn't do that, are you thinking of something else?
- Grimburger 3y agohttps://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/high-bandwidth-and-cpu-usage-from-go-ipfs/13982 https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/high-bandwidth-and-cpu-usage-fro...
- kkfx 3y agoDid you try to look at IPFS codebase size?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaw12 3y agowho is the target audience for this product? if companies, imagine the discussion they need to have when your communication channel relies on random machines vs single company with SLA/SLOs + bunch of engineers employed For enthusiasts maybe good, eventually maybe there will be ISP like providers which can guarantee hosting these nodes
- Manfred 3y agoThat's the cool thing about open source I guess. The target audience starts with the initial developer(s) who want to build it for their own reasons. Then others may find it and use it for their own purposes, even if it's just for education.
- totetsu 3y agoWho Is the Makers of this product is what i want to know also, because its not written anywhere.
- nine_k 3y agoI'd say that the target audience is (1) people who have some secrets to share among them, and (2) people who pretend they have such secrets, or just enjoy the feeling of extra privacy. The (1) may be good guys like whistleblowers, or journalists under oppressive regimes, or less so, like black market traders or gangsters. Also, a whole spectrum in between. The (2) are kids of all ages who love to play. If nobody plays with new tech, how can it even advance?
- quijoteuniv 3y agoWhy does this rely on Tor?
- _joel 3y agoSeems strange to me too, can't think of anything that would need it functionality wise that can't be done in less, let's say, problematic, dependencies. If you want to run on Tor, fine, just run Tor.
- huggingmouth 3y agoWhat do you find so problematic with tor? I've been using another chat app that uses tor (briar) to chat with my family and the chatting app has been working flawlessly for us so far. Tor curcomvents the nonsensical restrictions that isps place on users and makes it very easy to build p2p applications. No need for stuff like nat stun turn. Just exchange public keys and go! If anything, I find it weird that other p2p chat apps don't use tor given how easy and reliable it makes the chatting UX.
- _joel 3y agoI'd rather not participate in the network, have the network flow logs on my ISP and it's slow. You can run the app on top of Tor if you need it. Seems to be not just me that can't understand why it's needed and it's definitely turned me off as a potential user.
- holmesworcester 3y agoA lot of people think that by using Tor they are routing traffic for others, but this isn't the case. Is this what you mean? We don't want to turn people off with the use of Tor (since it makes connecting more reliable and is quite fast for chat once connected) so I'd love to learn more about the objection.
- Bu9818 3y agoWell, for one you can avoid messing with NAT traversal and port forwarding if you just use onion services. They list some more reasons here, mostly just for privacy/anonymity: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/wiki/Quiet-FAQ#why-does-quiet-use-tor-do-you-really-need-anonymity-and-censorship-resistance https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/wiki/Quiet-FAQ#why-does-qu...
- hfuaiobfa 3y agoWhat if I send some secret key using such a 'secure' app, and invoke some corporated app to sent large encrypted data? Thus the speed and security will both be granted.
- matt3210 3y agoSecure key exchange is a good idea, but your method hides the data, but not the source or destination
- snvzz 3y agoHow does it compare to the more mature Tox[0]? From a glance, it just looks heavier, more complicated, more moving pieces and opportunities for bugs. 0. https://tox.chat/ https://tox.chat/
- notpushkin 3y agoAnd before that there was TorChat [1] and another similar program I can't remember. I think both had some UX problems, but more importantly, they are generic chat networks like WhatsApp or Telegram, while this seems to be targeted specifically at Slack users (and the whole PKI architecture they rolled sounds like a nice fit for that). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorChat
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) Prior work like TorChat and Ricochet was actually a huge inspiration for Quiet. We build on their insight that if you use Tor onion services as your addresses in a peer-to-peer network, a lot of things get simpler. Where Quiet goes farther is that Richochet (and I believe TorChat) offered 1:1 synchronous message delivery where each user sends directly to another user's onion address. Group chats were not possible, and messages were delivered only when both users were online. In Quiet, having a gossip network (libp2p) and a CRDT (OrbitDB) lets us do group chats with the "eventual consistency" property that messages sent while you were offline can be synced from other peers when you return. This also allows for asynchronous message delivery of DMs in most cases: you can gossip your (encrypted) DMs to all peers, and as long as there is a continuity of syncing between peers, the recipient will be able to retrieve them even if you are no longer online. So yes, there are some more moving parts, but they let Quiet be a lot more like Slack, Discord, Signal, Messenger, and most modern messaging apps than TorChat or Ricochet were, which means Quiet can be more functional and familiar to new users looking for alternatives. I remember Tox from back in the day, but to my chagrin I have not assessed it since I started work on Quiet (I try to keep up on these things but there is so much prior work that didn't catch on for one reason or another!) At a glance, it looks like Tox supports groups, which goes beyond Ricochet. The most obvious single difference I see between Tox and Quiet right now is that Quiet is available for iOS (Testflight, for now) and Tox is not. iOS support has been a brutal slog (and the slog is not over) but it is a deal-breaker feature for every real-world team or community we have been able to talk to, so we are committed to making it work well.
- throwaway290 3y agoIf you don't need Tor, IPFS or P2P, Zulip is a much better open-source alternative.
- dijit 3y ago+1 for Zulip. It's "ugly" and thus people really don't like it over slack. But it's probably the best chat system available right now if you lean in to web tech. All I'm missing is the ability to create google meetings from inside the UI. And the mobile app is complete crap, but they're making a new one I heard.
- throwaway290 3y agoIf you self-host I think you can implement Google meetings integration in no time. It's just Python. And integration with Jitsi is built-in...
- yankput 3y agoIf all the users in the chat are offline, the chat is gone, right. Because it’s decentralised so there is nowhere to take the messages from? As there is no “cloud” edit: ahh yeah it’s in the FAQ in “session comparison”
- makeitdouble 3y agoIsn't P2P for group messaging a weakness more than an asset, especially if the messages have any importance (I'm thinking corporate settings for instance). Or am I missing some central piece that still acts as common server ? I'm imagining being a dev in a team, I'm the only one connected on a saturday night and and my laptop bursts in flame. Wouldn't it be nice to go to a fresh laptop, just log in the central server and have access to everything without waiting for someone to get online to sync the whole history of all your chats ? And of course, having to deal with the whole history in the first place feels like a pretty heavy issue. Using this system for a year or two with a few dozens of people would lead to crazy amounts of messages needing to exist on every client.
- earnesti 3y agoYou can run one server instance that is always online? Less stress because no need for high availability.
- happybeing 3y agop2p does not necessarily imply the limitation you describe. I don't know how Quiet uses IPFS but a truly decentralised storage system such as the design of Safe Network can hold data locally (eg using CRDTs) and/or in a decentralised, always accessible p2p network of nodes. Chunking and redundancy ensures data is always available without the need to centralise.
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here.) The OP's edge case is an interesting question and one we've given a lot of thought to! For privacy reasons Quiet does not use the global IPFS network and instead gives every team their own network. This provides a clearer story around metadata privacy protection and (most importantly!) ensures that timed deletion of messages is practical and meaningful. Disappearing messages are a must-have for many threat models, and deletion is much more meaningful when you're trusting clients within a community you trust to delete the messages, rather than trusting every peer on a global network anyone can join. So there are advantages to having an organization-specific network, and the problem the OP highlights does come up if there are no other devices online. Here's how we think about that edge case of "No other devices are online and I need to send this message before I sign off and know someone will see it as soon as they sign on": 1. If a team is worried about this, a computer under a desk or an Android device in a corner running Quiet is much easier to set up and maintain than a server, and it is trivial to add as many of these as you want in diverse locations until you are confident in the uptime, e.g. that any one of these devices could get unplugged or suffer an internet outage and it probably won't correlate or matter. 2. When running a server that does something important you need to have some separate monitoring setup like Pingdom and have someone on pager duty if you want to achieve respectable uptime. With Quiet, we can build that monitoring into the p2p app itself. We haven't done this yet, but picture a feature where the app shows you the uptime stats of your network and you designate nodes that should always be online. The network itself could notify you of any disturbance that threatens uptime, e.g. if one of your designated always-on nodes starts misbehaving. 3. People who don't want to worry about this can pay us or someone else to run a server for them and we'll make this easy. But it's better than depending on a centralized service because in most cases everything will still work if our server goes down, and they won't be dependent on us the way people depend on cloud SaaS, because Quiet is easy to fork and the fork will work pretty well out-of-the box in most cases with no infrastructure required. 4. It doesn't take many Android phones in full-p2p mode to give you a lot of often-online nodes, so continuous liveness could emerge organically in larger communities and it becomes more about showing metrics to give people confidence that this is the case (and making the experience on Android really nice--optimizing battery life, exposing choices to the user, etc.) 5. A small Quiet community without enough resources or participants to have enough always-on nodes could designate a larger, busier, more infrastructure-stable Quiet community as a trusted helper. The other community wouldn't see the plaintext of messages but it could support message syncing and provide other helpful resources. What I like about this is that well-resourced or tech-savvy communities could support other aligned communities without the hassle and responsibility of running a server.
- lionkor 3y agoLooks really interesting! Huge shame there isn't any native client, but at this point, I wouldn't even know what stack can still produce a native client without being shunned by HN ;)
- meiraleal 3y agowhat would be a native client? They need the nodejs server in the client so Electron and React Native are the platforms needed to support their architecture.
- lionkor 3y agoA native client would usually, for the most part, be written in a language native to that OS, and usually compiled. The discerning factor is that native apps, or any apps which use (actually) native GUI frameworks (as opposed to gpu rendering their own), integrate much better with the OS
- meiraleal 3y agoThis is the goal of React Native Desktop, not sure how good it is.
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) LOLOL. Ask HN: "How to produce a native client without being shunned by HN?"
- lionkor 3y agoI mean really - the obvious, most featureful and well known one would be C++ with Qt or something, but thats way too unsafe (says the crowd using Chrome which is mostly C++). Rust doesnt have any mature GUI frameworks, and Lisp is probably the best choice here (for some reason).
- jqpabc123 3y agoEver notice how most things P2P aren't really P2P? Like here for example, there are still servers involved running IPFS and Tor.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) We actually don't use any of that server-based IPFS infrastructure at all. Since Quiet is built on closed, private IPFS networks that are specific to each community we don't touch the global IPFS network. I think it's fair to call Tor a peer-to-peer network, especially if you don't use the exit nodes, which we do not. Yes, it's a peer-to-peer network with some special roles and generous volunteers who run always-on nodes, often on professional infrastructure. But Tor's design is peer-to-peer and Tor has paid thorough attention to the job of limiting the power of each node to harm the network, spy on users, etc. But yes, it's an excellent observation, and I totally agree with you that building real-world peer-to-peer networks with today's Internet and the world as it exists right now does require some compromises! The trick is to make sure those compromises are worth it and don't harm the goals you are trying to achieve. For us we're pretty confident they don't. Right now, Quiet lets you download a client and have a shared community space on the Internet with others that does not depend on any one entity's infrastructure. And no one, including us, has any special kind of technical control over what you do or say there. And you don't have to bring your own server (or have a friend with a server) to benefit from this freedom and power. These properties seem very significant to me, and that motivates me to keep chipping away on Quiet, despite the fact that things aren't always as pure as we might like them to be :)
- benlivengood 3y agoThere are still intermediate third-party routers between ISPs in any P2P system with less than a full mesh wireless network. Ham radio and audible conversation through the atmosphere are probably the only pure P2P connections.
- Asooka 3y agoI wonder if it wouldn't be easiest to "just" have phpBB hosted on an .onion service and build a frontend to that.
- holmesworcester 3y agoThen somebody's gotta run it, maintain uptime, etc.!
- edpichler 3y agoA bit off-topic: who else misses the UX we had back in the days of Google Talk? It was simple, light, beautiful, distraction free, user centric and fast. https://imgur.com/nf6gguY https://imgur.com/nf6gguY
- kybernetikos 3y agoAnd had bridges across to other systems and POTS! It was amazing. Curse of google though. They replaced it with 4 other non-interacting chat systems, none of which were as good.
- awestroke 3y agoSeems like you can add people to your community but not remove them.
- verandaguy 3y agoEDIT: this comment's mostly moot as an argument but I'm keeping it around for discussion. The founder of Quiet replied here[0]. This being on Tor gives me mixed feelings. Tor's a volunteer run, fairly resource-heavy privacy tool designed to protect the most vulnerable internet users out there -- people facing state censorship on the level of corporal punishment being used, for example. While the Tor network has more capacity these days than it used to, and while having a good toolchain for Tor's intended user base matters, that's rarely the intended user base of apps like this. When something like Quiet comes along, even with its targeting of users in open societies, it would benefit both technically and ethically from using non-Tor networks: HTTPS is safer than ever, and if you use ECH, DNS-over-HTTPS, and have reasonable cipher requirements for TLS, you can achieve an excellent level of privacy. For when open society groups need to talk to people at risk of harm, having a Tor bridge or other such mode would be a good way to approach that. It also makes implementing video and audio much easier technically, and it decouples the "casual user" code base from the "sensitive user" code base; while that means you might have less shared code, it also means you can focus on security through simplicity (by way of fewer or less-complex features) for the sensitive users. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480552
- anon____ 3y agoOn the other hand, if projects like this, as a side effect, increase the number of relays, and normalize using Tor, it's a win for everyone. Quiet should pay for a few servers to be used as relays and exit nodes, and also encourage users to do so, or to donate to that.
- pshirshov 3y agoRecently I've tried to organise an IPFS source mirror for a linux distro. Surprisingly it is unsuitable for the purpose. My node had ~800 peers, but only half of the nodes around the world were able to download anything even more than 24 hours after publishing. I don't know what's wrong but seemingly IPFS suffers from permanent brainsplit condition.
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) Quiet creates small, closed, private IPFS networks specific to each community, so it avoids a lot of the performance problems that plague the big global IPFS network, and is also a lot more private! We've run real tests with hundreds of nodes on Fargate and saw message delivery times grow to just a second or two. Plus there's a lot of room for optimization because right now OrbitDB doesn't even use the gossip network for broadcasting message data--it just broadcasts DAG heads and peers have to fetch message data in a second step! Making initial connections between peers is slow over Tor, and there are some known issues in Quiet right now when switching networks. But those aren't IPFS issues and once you're connected it's surprisingly fast. Also, while IPFS suffers from scaling issues, the underlying gossip network (which for us is the most important part) is currently powering the Ethereum beacon chain, which has a massive number of peers (~800,000 IIRC?). So the gossip protocol library Quiet builds on is very robust. Future optimizations of Quiet will likely move the burden of moving data down the stack to the gossip protocol, and only use IPFS for "catch up" syncing and ensuring eventual consistency.
- k__ 3y agoI recently turned a HTTP service to an Onion service (i.e., running a service on Tor without exit node) and it was surprisingly simple and low effort. Tor comes with a bunch of features out-of-the-box that are really convenient, like NAT punching or encryption without SSL certificates.
- huggingmouth 3y agoThis is what I really like about tor services. The ease in which I was able to host a blog off my heavly-natted phone internet uplink blew my mind about a decade ago. (Granted my excitement was quickly ruined by how fast my newfound pocket server ran out of juice). Today we have better options for hosting but none for dns and encryption. DNS+TLS doesn't come close to the security and reliability provided by having your address be your public key. In fact, and don't think any addressing scheme does. Offering your service as an onion service or at least making your (secured) admin panels accessible via tor is a no brainer in my opinion. No other entity can accidently block access as long as you have the private keys and tor is up.
- k__ 3y ago"making your (secured) admin panels accessible via tor" Very good suggestion, thanks!
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) Yes! This is very underappreciated! Tor is like the Internet we all dream of having: forever addresses for everyone, with built-in hole punching. Tor startup and onion address connection times can be slow, but this is improving!
- mrusme 3y agoWhile I do like the idea behind a P2P E2EE chat, I believe that unless you're willing to invest heavily into OrbitDB and IPFS, this project will stay niche at best. The performance issues that come along with running OrbitDB/IPFS on a machine, let alone a mobile device, are still significant unfortunately. Adding Electron on top of what is already a heavy-weight application is probably going to make people's devices go brrrrr all the time. Not only that, but I would argue that for instant communication this stack might not be the best idea in terms of performance in first place. Besides, the way IPFS has been (and still keeps) changing their dozens of libraries doesn't make development particularly smooth either. OrbitDB is always behind the latest IPFS version due to all these changes that are being introduced. Hence unless you're planning to allocate developer time on these two things as well, my guess is that you probably won't have too much fun with your back-end. The integration with Tor is another thing that will likely be a time drain for developers, as other people here already pointed out, and that will lead to even more performance issues down the line. Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea behind this project. However, I feel like the aspirations are unrealisticly high and the actual outcome might be realtively frustrating for the average end-user. Having that said, I would love my gut feeling to be proven wrong! Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Superhighway84 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System#App..., https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84 https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84), a USENET-inspired, uncensorable, decentralized internet discussion system running on IPFS & OrbitDB.
- _-_-__-_-_- 3y agoYour website is awesome. I read it all the time to get inspiration for my own projects. Please keep positing builds and making awesome projects.
- holmesworcester 3y agoThank you!!!
- chasingtheflow 3y agoWhich site?
- bogwog 3y agoI just downloaded it and was surprised at how simple the whole process was. With technobabble like "Tor", "IPFS", "OrbitDB", "P2P", etc I was expecting to have to read through a manual and set up some complex stuff, but no. I just downloaded the app, picked a name for my community, and picked a username for myself. That's faster, easier, and more private than Discord, Slack, etc which require you to enter an email address and phone number. There has to be a catch to this, right?
- holmesworcester 3y ago(Quiet founder here) Yes! Onboarding in a p2p app can actually be easier than onboarding to a centralized app like Slack, and much easier than onboarding to a federated app like Matrix (where users need to have a notion of what a homeserver is to not mess up.) The catches are many, but inherently solvable! 1. You have to be online for invitees to initially join your community. We have a release planned this week that will relax/mitigate this. 2. Sometimes it will take 20 or 30 seconds to connect to a peer over Tor, and this is longer than most users expect. 3. Mobile is much harder than desktop and our mobile apps aren't in as polished a state as the desktop app. iOS background tasks and Android long-tail device support are hard! 4. iOS will almost definitely depend on a centralized push notification service for reliable notifications. 5. If you send a message and nobody is online, nobody will get it until you and someone else are contemporaneously online. And there are more. But your point stands! Quiet can offer a superior onboarding experience in a lot of ways, and it can be snappy for day-to-day use. And thanks for taking the time to try Quiet and relaying this lovely impression to everyone here!
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoHow are naming conflicts handled? I could imagine community names might need to be unique across the service and usernames unique per community but I wonder if there's something smarter which might allow seeming duplicates which are otherwise differentiated. One example is -- I guess not exactly "smarter" -- Discord with the user#numeric_id pattern.
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- up2isomorphism 3y agolibxx.so in a software distribution? Does not look right.
- proprietario 3y agoInteresting project! After diving into the codebase and looking around I found that iOS is not native... any plans on switching? otherwise are there some docs/papers on how this has to be implemented so I can start my own?
- holmesworcester 3y agoWow that would be amazing. Wanna create an issue for a native iOS client and we'll discuss there?
- boredumb 3y agoAs someone using matrix currently: Is there a reason i'd switch to something like this for my business use or is their really only legit use cases around journalists/activists?
- TheNorthman 3y agoThe advantage of tor over just E2EE is that it hides the sources of traffic and not only the traffic itself. So it really depends on if your threat model can handle others knowing that you're using Matrix. It most likely can.
- holmesworcester 3y agoThe big advantage is that Quiet doesn't make you set up a server or rely on someone else's.
- comova 3y agoincredible concept and really well built. so many hard problems being tackled here!
- holmesworcester 3y agoThanks!!
- viscousviolin 3y agoDoes anyone feel like trying this out with some folks from here?