Tox works now, but for all their talk of trying to be user-friendly, asking users to exchange long alphanumeric sequences inherently isn't.
Psyc, maybe?
Tox's goal is essentially to create a user-friendly Skype-like chat application, with not centralized server, and strong security by default.
The downside is that your user ID on tox looks like this:
56A1ADE4B65B86BCD51CC73E2CD4E542179F47959FE3E0E21B4B0ACDADE51855D34D34D37CB5
Ah, see, you lost me there already. I'm sure it's clever and well made and all the rest of it, but fully distributed systems either almost never work, are very difficult to get setup and use properly, or end up just not being fully distributed systems (eg. early Skype and it's "supernodes" or whatever it called them, aka "servers", or Tor [which I love] and it's directory authorities which admittedly are elected, but even so are effectively just "servers", or Bittorrent which has either trackers, aka "servers", or hard-coded DHT bootstrap nodes, aka also "servers").
Distributed systems sound great in theory, but in the real world I just never think they're worth the effort, or you have to compromise them and add some centralized element anyways, at which point you might as well just use a federated system so that people who don't want to deal with all that can use a third party server and people who do want their own specially contained distributed node can just run their own server and client.
But once a node is acutually inside the DHT, it should never need to talk to the bootstrap nodes ever again: that's a pretty major win, in some respects.
First, they have full forward secrecy. This is notably unlike Ring, which does not.
Secondly, all communications are end to end encrypted and endpoint-verified, as there's no "legacy SIP support" (eg: SIP) or such nonsense and the DHT addresses your contacts gave you are actual ec25519 public keys.
For nontechnical users, that's a massive downside. The first tox client to integrate ToxMe into itself will get very popular, very fast, provided it's got the right marketing.
I disagree entirely. It's an upside. They get to benefit from PKI without even understanding anything. A person's address gets them the actual person.
ToxMe requires trusting the ToxMe identity provider, and is an obvious point of attack. And we'd no doubt see fake addresses that resemble other peoples, and other such nonsense.
There's minimising the inconvenience (with ideas like the QR code feature they have), and there's plain giving up security for minimal gained convenience, which we should just avoid.
Yes, but which messaging service will the nontechnical user use? The one where they can exchange usernames, or even phone numbers, and it Just Works? Or the one where they have to give their friends a long alphanumeric sequence of gibberish?
It doesn't benefit them if they don't use the protocol.
>ToxMe requires trusting the ToxMe identity provider, and is an obvious point of attack. And we'd no doubt see fake addresses that resemble other peoples, and other such nonsense.
Obviously. This is why it's a bad thing that nontechs will probably go in that direction, if they use Tox at all.
>(with ideas like the QR code feature they have)
I was hoping somebody had implement QR: that helps a lot, but I'm not sure if it's enough...
There's no benefit from using the protocol if it gives up security for convenience like the others.
> Obviously. This is why it's a bad thing that nontechs will probably go in that direction, if they use Tox at all.
My point exactly.
Ouch. qTox had it for quite some time already, and given that I didn't observe massive increase in its popularity (there was increase, but ~normal), it's got to be the marketing (or lack of thereof)...
Sadly, I don't know about marketing, and while there were some people who could into marketing, hiring them would require money, which Tox ecosystem doesn't have at all, and if it had, it would be spent on hiring devs part or full time. :|
With that being said, it's quite likely that the UI for the integration in qTox is not the best one, and could use some improvements. If you have any suggestions / ideas how it could be made better, please don't hesitate to make an issue on qTox repo with them: https://github.com/qTox/qTox . Or any other part of qTox.
Anyways, aside from qTox also Antox should have ToxMe integration. I don't know about other clients.
In terms of "syncing data everywhere" being 'terrible for realtime messaging'... i'm not sure that holds water ;)