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(Quiet founder here) I agree with the objection that not everybody can just contribute patches for major features to an open source project, and I think it's f

(Quiet founder here) I agree with the objection that not everybody can just contribute patches for major features to an open source project, and I think it's fair to say that the comparison to Slack and Discord is not 1:1 without voice and video calls (which we do plan to offer someday, FWIW) and to feel disappointed by that. Though I think when an open source alternative emerges it is usually understood that it could take a while to get to feature parity, and we try to be very clear about what Quiet already does and doesn't do yet on our homepage. That said, Quiet is written in TypeScript and built on a web stack almost every engineer is somewhat familiar with, so it's really easy to get hacking on, and we'd love the help. :) Here are the instructions to build Quiet desktop: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desktop/README.md https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desk... And here are some good first issues! https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQuery=good+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22 https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQu...

notpushkin 3y ago
Agreed, the web stack should definitely help get some contributions. I might take a look too :-) Tangential but have you considered something like https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ instead of Electron for the app? (One of my major concerns with Electron apps is that every app ships and runs its own copy of Chromium – Tauri mitigates that by using system web engine instead.)
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  We might switch to Tauri someday. Death-by-a-thousand-cuts is a very serious risk for us though, so we're trying to choose the most mature and widely-used tools whenever possible. As noted on our website, we still have a lot of work to do on security (including some open issues you could probably tackle! and thanks for expressing interest!!) so it will be a wonderful day when Electron's lag in staying up to date with Chrome security fixes is our most pressing security issue! In the meantime, if Signal chooses Electron that is a good indicator that, all things considered, it is a good choice for us. They have a lot more resources than us, are much farther along than we are, and they take security seriously. One immediate issue with Tauri, just to give an example, is that it would require us to worry about Safari quirks on Mac. I've also heard from projects in our space that the handling of platform-specific functionality outside the browser window is not as mature in Tauri as it is in Electron. This is totally understandable and Tauri is a great project with great goals, but the possibility of running into some deal-breaker Windows-specific issue, say, is scary.

notpushkin 3y ago

Agreed, the web stack should definitely help get some contributions. I might take a look too :-) Tangential but have you considered something like https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ instead of Electron for the app? (One of my major concerns with Electron apps is that every app ships and runs its own copy of Chromium – Tauri mitigates that by using system web engine instead.)

holmesworcester 3y ago
We might switch to Tauri someday. Death-by-a-thousand-cuts is a very serious risk for us though, so we're trying to choose the most mature and widely-used tools whenever possible. As noted on our website, we still have a lot of work to do on security (including some open issues you could probably tackle! and thanks for expressing interest!!) so it will be a wonderful day when Electron's lag in staying up to date with Chrome security fixes is our most pressing security issue! In the meantime, if Signal chooses Electron that is a good indicator that, all things considered, it is a good choice for us. They have a lot more resources than us, are much farther along than we are, and they take security seriously. One immediate issue with Tauri, just to give an example, is that it would require us to worry about Safari quirks on Mac. I've also heard from projects in our space that the handling of platform-specific functionality outside the browser window is not as mature in Tauri as it is in Electron. This is totally understandable and Tauri is a great project with great goals, but the possibility of running into some deal-breaker Windows-specific issue, say, is scary.