Comment by holmesworcester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holmesworcester | Hacker News Reader

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holmesworcester

(Quiet founder here) Yes! Onboarding in a p2p app can actually be easier than onboarding to a centralized app like Slack, and much easier than onboarding to a federated app like Matrix (where users need to have a notion of what a homeserver is to not mess up.)

The catches are many, but inherently solvable!

1. You have to be online for invitees to initially join your community. We have a release planned this week that will relax/mitigate this.

2. Sometimes it will take 20 or 30 seconds to connect to a peer over Tor, and this is longer than most users expect.

3. Mobile is much harder than desktop and our mobile apps aren't in as polished a state as the desktop app. iOS background tasks and Android long-tail device support are hard!

4. iOS will almost definitely depend on a centralized push notification service for reliable notifications.

5. If you send a message and nobody is online, nobody will get it until you and someone else are contemporaneously online.

And there are more. But your point stands! Quiet can offer a superior onboarding experience in a lot of ways, and it can be snappy for day-to-day use. And thanks for taking the time to try Quiet and relaying this lovely impression to everyone here!

How are naming conflicts handled? I could imagine community names might need to be unique across the service and usernames unique per community but I wonder if there's something smarter which might allow seeming duplicates which are otherwise differentiated. One example is -- I guess not exactly "smarter" -- Discord with the user#numeric_id pattern.

In Quiet there is no global naming. A community is joined through an invite link (a bundle of onion addresses) so multiple communities can have the same name. Usernames are unique only within communities, and we use certificates signed by the community creator as a single source of truth on names. However, in order to allow joining when the community creator is not online, we will release changes this week that let users join provisionally with any name, even duplicates. We will show an 'unregistered' badge until registered and a 'duplicate' badge if duplicate. We will also show an aggressive warning to everyone if the registrar is malicious and gives multiple public keys the same name.

It seemed important to get unique usernames within a community because users expect that from apps like Slack and Discord.

Does it make sense to have an option to disable Tor and just use normal network since all other features are appealing.

We'll probably do this soon. Tor simplifies peer discovery and NAT traversal a lot though, so disabling Tor is actually harder unless you have a very reliable STUN/TURN service you plan to support forever.

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