Hacker News Reader

Comment by quijoteuniv | Hacker News Reader

Why does this rely on Tor?

Well, for one you can avoid messing with NAT traversal and port forwarding if you just use onion services.

They list some more reasons here, mostly just for privacy/anonymity: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/wiki/Quiet-FAQ#why-does-qu...

So run Tor if you need those, I'm still not getting why it needs to be a dependency persobnally.

It simplifies p2p network design and removes the need for us to run STUN/TURN servers.

Endpoint discoverability is important. You just need to come up with an hidden onion address and the network takes care or getting you connected to that address. That removes the need for a common server.

This and NAT holepunching!

Came here to ask this.. Embedding tor is a bit disingenious for adoption because it puts you in the same bucket as a lot of very abusive content. Not worth it IMO and the extreme privacy protection isn't really needed here.

Seems strange to me too, can't think of anything that would need it functionality wise that can't be done in less, let's say, problematic, dependencies.

If you want to run on Tor, fine, just run Tor.

What do you find so problematic with tor?

I've been using another chat app that uses tor (briar) to chat with my family and the chatting app has been working flawlessly for us so far.

Tor curcomvents the nonsensical restrictions that isps place on users and makes it very easy to build p2p applications. No need for stuff like nat stun turn. Just exchange public keys and go!

If anything, I find it weird that other p2p chat apps don't use tor given how easy and reliable it makes the chatting UX.

I'd rather not participate in the network, have the network flow logs on my ISP and it's slow. You can run the app on top of Tor if you need it. Seems to be not just me that can't understand why it's needed and it's definitely turned me off as a potential user.

A lot of people think that by using Tor they are routing traffic for others, but this isn't the case. Is this what you mean?

We don't want to turn people off with the use of Tor (since it makes connecting more reliable and is quite fast for chat once connected) so I'd love to learn more about the objection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com