quiet VS wormhole-william

> because, right here right now, that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration of proof of concept using currently-available technology.

So I just want to point out that IPFS was fairly deliberately designed to have numerous, forward-compatible features that could be swapped out in the future : like https://multiformats.io/ and in particular https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/ .

In the IPFS community, there's always been a fairly heated discussion about which bit of the entire system should be stuck with the term IPFS. Like, if you took away the libp2p protocol, and just served CIDs over http, would it be IPFS? What if you took away CAR files (the merkle-tree file format used to define multi-item content)? What if you're a private IPFS network, with no shared nodes with the public network (like https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet ). What if you didn't use bitswap, the file transfer protocol (Filecoin doesn't use bitswap, and mostly doesn't interconnect with the main public IPFS network). What about if you didn't use a DHT to find providers of a CID. What if you're not using any of the "IPFS" software stack, but your implementation still uses bits and pieces of content-addressability as defined in the standard?

Interestingly, right now, there are a bunch of experiments going in all of these directions: I think it's fair to say that if you wanted to test out content-addressable networks across the solar system, they probably wouldn't be IPFS as it is now, but their nature could probably be described using the primitives the IPFS stack uses, and learning about what needs to change would give a useful direction to some part of the extended IPFS ecosystem.

Their website is at https://www.tryquiet.org

> do you have an individual username for each community, or will your profile eventually be the same across all the communities you're in?

We're starting with names specific to each community, since that is simplest/cleanest and best for privacy.

> profiles you can customize to servers can be useful, so long as you can still trace them back to the user's actual profile. otherwise that might enable masquerading as other users

There are some decentralization-friendly ways you could link your profile to other profiles, like a Discord or HN account. tlsnotary.org is one example. Would that be good for preventing masquerading?

> users able to mark as invisible (appearing offline without actually being so)? good to have in many situations imo, obscuring information from people who may be a danger to you

we do plan to do this, but it's some complexity to really hide it from a tech-savvy malicious user, so the first version of invisibility will be weak and we'll tell users this. Here's the open issue and there are links to proposed designs in there if you'd like to give feedback! https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/1504

> how is name collision handled? in a large community, you're bound to have a few people who want the same name (and i get it, your screen name can be very personal) discord's old solution, a username and 4 digit id (e.g. felix#1234), seemed convenient and effective to me, but there must be tons of solutions; i like having a way to easily distinguish two users with the same screen name

we're not allowing name collisions for registered users. in the coming release there will also be unregistered users who will have a badge until they register with the community owner. if the community owner lets registered users' names collide we treat that as an impersonation attack and warn everyone. since names aren't global you'll usually be able to get the name you want!

> personally blocking users you are uncomfortable interacting with, kicking users from communities vs. banning repeat offenders in a more permanent way, temporarily muting a spamming user? kicking vs. banning can be an important distinction; i'd rather kick you if you're just inactive all the time, you're free to rejoin whenever you like

we don't have user removal yet but obviously that's a big priority for us.

since we don't have usernames, to ban somebody you would kick them and reset the invite link. blocking and muting and silencing people will all be very straightforward. as will roles and other kinds of moderation, and external identity linking would be helpful for this too. you'd be able to make someone link another profile and approve who you are letting in.

> i like keeping it very, very clear what does (or does not) happen when you block, kick, ban, etc; a user shouldn't have to "test" features like these

this is a great note, thank you!

> important to keep in mind that you rarely (or never) want a user to completely disappear; i always want to leave the option to get back in touch, unban, unmute, etc.

hmmmm. this is an interesting and cool idea I have not run into before. yeah, unban and unmute are possible.

> a friends system is useful for this; maybe i don't want anyone i haven't marked as a friend to DM me

Our first plan is to not allow DMs at all outside a community, but there are some ways we could do this.

> selectively muting different portions of the app (e.g. i only want to be notified of a DM or @ mention, or only notifications from this community, or no notifications from this channel except @ mentions)

this is planned, and thanks for the details! Here's the issue for channel notifications: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/623

> what if i want to be notified whenever this phrase pops up in a community? might be a question of how easily you can build your own scripts on top of Quiet (which i would quite like to do)

i'd love to enable this someday but we have no immediate plans to. but it is one exciting thing about a fully user-controlled app: you can give users a lot of flexibility. Imagine a team chat that was as flexible as Wordpress!

> are voice and/or video planned, both in communities as well as dms?

yes, but I'm not sure if we'll do unlimited group calls for free, since we'll need servers for this piece so it's a natural place for us to charge money (we'll need to). And I don't really have clear plans for how voice or video will work yet, since it's far off.

> i've seen many communities in other applications where multiple "owners" existed, as it can make a more safe/welcoming community. if one owner in any way becomes untrustworthy, having someone with equal permissions in place to get rid of them and undo damage can help; whether they can remove each other or not seems like an important decision

yes, we'll allow multiple owners at some point, though the naming role will belong to one user. https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/1758

> question about the threat model; members are not capable of sending messages that appear to be from another member, which implies that owners are capable of this? that could become a serious issue if true

this is an issue right now yeah. what we can and will do very soon is show an aggressive warning almost immediately in most circumstances if this happens. see: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/119. but there are edge cases where spoofing could happen that are hard to reason about or convey, so it's unlikely we'll fully address this weakness soon.

> user discovery outside of communities, preferably just typing in a username they send you elsewhere?

Global naming features like this exist in tension with decentralization, unless you make people pay for usernames, which isn't a great experience.

> will it be possible to delete an entire community? can an owner do this in situations where members don't agree?

Yes. A member could block deletion by not going online or by modifying their Quiet app, but deletion is important enough for activists that we want to make it easy. Maybe this is a setting on the community level or user level.

> searching channels (and more advanced searches; sent by this user, with an image attached, in this channel; hopefully accessible to users even if they can't do regex on the fly, lol)

we'll definitely have search but don't yet!

> i've found it frustrating not to be able to search every community i'm in at once for something i said; is that feasible?

yes! it's all on your computer so totally feasible and this is a helpful note! i feel this way about email all the time when using gmail so I get it.

> any distinction between a community and a DM with 3+ users in it?

DMs will exist within a community; a community is at the level of a Discord server, e.g. We're not planning to do the Slack thing of giving ad hoc group chats their own special status, but 1:1 DMs will be special probably.

> dark mode, and in my opinion, ideally a way to customize everything more thoroughly. if thorough customization, maybe a way to save/export those settings to share?

We already have designs for dark mode: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/1502. what app or site does customization great? what approach can we follow, if any?

> maybe the ability to see separate messages sent in a row - is that a message in 3 lines, or 3 messages? just hovering and seeing one line highlighted (and the timestamp for just that line)?

these two things drive me crazy too! See: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/505 & https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/issues/1403

> embedding video and audio files in a convenient manner? replying to messages, pinning them to channels (so they can be easily found again) seem very useful

we'll definitely do this!

> channel organization and categories; i don't always want the art channels open, i want #announcements at the top, etc.

Cool, I'll make an issue for this!

> messages marked as read/unread can be useful, something to carefully think about. client side unread; i'd like to pick up from the last message i read in this channel

we have a floating "unread" notification but there's more on this to do!

> sometimes i like knowing that someone has read my message; sometimes i like the safety that comes with people not being able to know. if i had to pick, it'd be the latter, users can always prove they have read something by responding to it

We can do either but now we don't show who has read your messages, with the same caveats as above about strict invisibility of your online status being tricky.

> keyboard navigation beyond pressing tab is super useful; a screen you can reach to describe these shortcuts is equally so

Yeah! Ctrl-K works right now for jumping to channels but we don't make it discoverable enough.

My team is building Quiet, an alternative to team chat apps like Slack and Discord that works as you describe:

https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme

> Granted, sending a message would require all parties to be online at the same time, but there could be a set of relay servers to hold messages until they get fetched.

We actually do a bit better than this! We use a gossip network (libp2p gossipsub) so all peers don't have to connect directly, and a CRDT over a private IPFS network so that everyone in a community eventually syncs all messages. As long as there's a continuity of online peers, the availability of messages is the same as a central server, and with a few Android users in the mix it's pretty easy to get to that level of continuity.

(The battery impact of staying connected all the time isn't as bad as you'd think, and we haven't even begun to optimize it.)

And yes, it builds on the maturity of Tor rather than trying to roll its own onion routing layer as Session is doing.

If you want go, there is a magic-wormhole implementation called wormhole-william [1].

Rymdport [2] is a decent cross-platform app using it.

[1] https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

A more popular and, I think, carefully analyzed alternative, from which croc was inspired, is Magic Wormhole; a good Golang implementation that compiles down to a single binary is wormhole-william:

https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases

Wormhole William, a slightly janky Android implementation of magic wormhole, for simple file sharing between devices. Mostly works!

use the go version (which you have to download from github) https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

And there’s wormhole-William, but as a derivative of the Python magic wormhole it loses points for originality.

If you want to encrypt files and upload to the cloud, rclone. Otherwise age and Wormhole-William.