ricochet VS RetroShare

This looks like a much more polished alternative to Ricochet: https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Ricochet seems dead. It's been five years since its last commit to their git repo, and their website's certificate expired last year. This is probably why you can't find much information.

I think something like Ricochet (if it were still actively maintained) could be a good solution.

https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Every user is their own Tor onion service, so you get E2E encryption and no centralized servers. The whole thing hinges on the security of Tor itself which is probably a safe enough bet.

With that being said, if I had just one piece of advice - try to avoid ostentatious phrases like Speek is by far the most secure way to converse or 100% anonymous. Tor itself is not 100% anonymous, so that should immediately make anyone cautious. One of the things that I admired about the original Ricochet was that the developers never made brazen claims about their software. In fact, quite the opposite.

Check out https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/blob/master/doc/prot.... It is metadata-free. It does not require a centralized server. It uses Tor.

[1] https://cwtch.im/ [2] https://ricochet.im/

Abandoned, unmaintained, deprecated or unreleased: Ricochet, TOR Messenger, Cwtch

ricochet.im website not working (??)

> there isn't a currently easily available obvious way to have private secure conversations.

Ricochet[1] works really well. It uses Tor hidden services to communicate. Your Ricochet ID is your onion address. To add a contact, you input their Ricochet ID and a short message, and Ricochet connects to their onion address and sends a contact request. If the contact request is accepted then you'll each show up as a contact on each other's client and can chat whenever you want.

Tor is really perfect for this, you can't get more private or censorship-resistant than Tor.

The UI is currently not great, but that's not a protocol problem.

The biggest problem with Ricochet is that hardly anyone is using it.

[1] https://ricochet.im/

Reminds me of retroshare, which is fully peer to peer and anonymizing. Anyone here try it before? Meant for closed communities and not open/global so a different niche I suppose

https://retroshare.cc/

Retro Share https://retroshare.cc/ free and open source.

Retroshare via Tor/I2P

Retroshare also offers encrypted connections that meeting hosts and participants can create a network of computers on and layer distributed services on top of it, like discussion forums, text-based chat, and email. This P2P platform is free, open-source, and fully decentralized, designed to provide maximum security and anonymity. It's available to Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows users.

I think you can do that with https://retroshare.cc/

Utopia has similarities to RetroShare, but RetroShare has more capability: portable, forums, channels, boards, Tor/I2P.

For messaging, retroshare is really good, it looks like an old forum messenger, but is free to download. its completely ad free.