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Comment by maverick74 | Hacker News Reader

there is also Briar ( briarproject.org )

;)

Are there any public forums on Briar? I'd kinda like to try out that aspect of it (and the blogs) but it suffers somewhat from a blank canvas when first setting it up :D

Edit: Looking closer I see contacts have to share forums, which is a shame. Would be nice to be able to join directly from a code.

The only p2p messenger I've used that hasn't suffered too badly from "blank canvas" is Manyverse.

It's technically not a dedicated messenger (more like a p2p encrypted Facebook equivalent, with a p2p FBMessenger equivalent built-in as a side feature), but that aspect just makes it a lot easier to find people to chat with.

It's unfortunately not quite as stable/performant as Briar though (yet).

I did have a bit of a play with Manyverse (and with SSB itself in the past) and it looks interesting. The lack of syncing between desktop and mobile SSB accounts is a bit of a pain which I think will hinder adoption until they come up with a solution to that.

I do worry that a lot of these newer messengers and networks are operating on a memory of what social networking was like in 2010. Quite a few at least handle photos, but few, if any, handle videos, and none that I've seen have pinched Facebook's events, which are a pretty key feature for me in convincing people to swap.

> lack of syncing between desktop and mobile SSB accounts is a bit of a pain

Yeah that's something they're actively trying to figure out, but it's tricky given their "Signal-/WhatsApp-esque" single-device architecture.

I think some of the work Matrix are doing on federated key exchange could be of some help though; my general understanding is that multidevice, single-account encrypted communication is hard.

What if they use IPFS for encrypted larger file size messages and treat the main message as they would an on-chain message that references the ipfs CID?

What on Earth us Facebook Events? During a pandemic lockdown?

Ha ha.

Events was the only feature keeping me on Facebook pre-lockdown. I only realised months after the pandemic started that I'd forgotten to login to Facebook since.

Would still be nice to have a non-Facebook platform to use for this if irl events ever resume.

One thing about Manyverse and ssb that scared me off after a while is that all of the content you view gets downloaded on your device / phone, and then subsequently passed on to others. So if you subscribe to some sort of public group and someone posts some disgusting / illegal shit you're now downloading it onto your device and in the worst case share it further against your will. Has there been any progress towards eliminating that issue, or am I just too paranoid about it?

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