Cwtch (Instant Messenger)

I find keeping up with messengers to be a bit exhausting. I mostly use Signal personally, but am curious why Cwtch is not a recommended messenger?

Where does the community stand on it?

I am also curious about richochet, since that is the protocol it is built on top of.

Cwtch looks interesting and I’m excited to see where it will eventually go, but it’s way too early for it at this point.

Criteria for real-time communication can be found here:

Has Cwtch been audited at this point? Is it out of alpha/beta?

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https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/s2hil6/simplex_chat_v1_released_the_most_private_and/hsjr3ye/

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Cwtch is in beta. We should put this in #waiting

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Now targeting Stable V to be released 31-Aug-2023

@jonah Can you tag this one as waiting ?

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Taking into consideration the time passed since last discussion and the updates since then, is it time to review the consideration?

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As far as I know they still do not have a stable release.

Looks like stable was released on September 27, 2023.
source: Cwtch 1.13 Stable Release Candidate | The Cwtch Handbook

I also see support for Whonix, which is encouraging.

change log: Cwtch: Decentralized, Surveillance Resistant Infrastructure

Release Candidate

so… not a stable release at all.

Did you read this? Curious where your “not a stable release at all” assessment comes from

Cwtch 1.13 is the culmination of the last few years of effort by the Cwtch team, and is the first release that meets our bar to be labelled a Cwtch Stable candidate.

I was wondering this myself…

:man_shrugging: seems like he cherry picked the word “candidate” and didnt read the actual notes about the release

Right here, where that is exactly what they said in the release notes you quoted?

Meeting the bar to be a candidate for a stable release is not meeting the bar to be a stable release, pretty plainly speaking.

@jonah

Every Orbot and DivestOS release is an RC fwiw, and both are recommended.

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Is there anything that Cwtch provides over SimpleX?

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not really, imo, beyond forcing Tor connections by default
edit: also one to one chats are p2p without a server intermediary, group chats would function through servers in a way similar to Simplex

The Executive Directory of the Open Privacy Research Society (developer of Cwtch), Sarah Jamie Lewis, tells in these posts how Cwtch has stronger metadata protection than SimpleX, mentions some problems with SimpleX, and clears up some misconceptions (at least according to her) about SimpleX and Cwtch. In Mastodon’s posts she seems to be referring to SimpleX, although she preferred not to explicitly say which application(s) she was talking about.

2 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/s2hil6/comment/hsp09it/

This year, April (see the complete threads):

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Noting that we should look at this for real now that they have a stable release…

Off to a bad start. I’ll try some other platforms tomorrow.


Edit: :grimacing:

They’re probably right as far as the security benefits of code signing (or lack thereof) go, but this is a major usability issue IMO.