Discord, Slack and Element analog with TOR & IPFS.
What you mean on this?
Hello? Briar did this a decade ago.
3 Likes
Sounds nifty. Marking this as waiting (for a stable release) before we take another look: It wouldn’t be anything we’d say people should actually use at the moment anyways, given this statement:
Quiet is in beta and shouldn’t be used for activities requiring security.
I do dislike this claim about Signal on their website:
Apps like Signal […] do encrypt messages, but they still leak metadata, such as who you talk to and when, to whoever runs the server.
Signal’s metadata protection features like Sealed Sender mitigate these problems fairly effectively. Privacy projects should stop taking shots at other privacy projects for no good reason all the time. Quiet could just compare themselves to crap messengers like WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord and they’d look way better in my eyes. Their own threat model literally suggests using a Signal group to securely perform the initial invitation exchange 
6 Likes
Yeah, apart from a snazzy UI , i fail to see what this provides so far above something like Briar. If you wanted more features, one could also first look at Cwtch.
Cant see how this is going to work without some (de)centralized server acting as a sync-hub. But wish all the best; the more alternatives the better.
Doesn’t Briar have a fundamentally different focus / use-case?
My rough understanding of Briar is it is more focused on the same type of comms as Signal (just with a higher priority for anonymity and extreme censorship resistance, for activists and dissidents) and less focused on the type of comms that Slack or to some extent Matrix or Discord are focused on (Teams, Organizations, groups). Or have I misunderstood Briar and it is more ‘matrix like’ than ‘signal like’ user experience?
Fair point, definitely good to be aware of, but I think both statements can be true (Briar can place more of a priority on anonymity than Signal while still acknowledging it falls short of true anonymity).
But, I want to refocus on my main question / concern:
Doesn’t Briar have a fundamentally different focus / use-case? [than Slack, Matrix, etc]
For me, Signal and Matrix satisfy very different use-cases. I think of Briar as much closer to Signal but maybe I am mischaracterizing it due to lack of experience. I do see they compare some of their modes of communication to Telegram (private groups, forums, blogs) but I don’t use Telegram so that doesn’t mean much to me.
If you have used Briar extensively, I’m curious how suitable you think it might be as a replacement for the Privacy Guides Matrix rooms for instance?
Seems not that effective…