Status-node Alternatives

status-node reviews and mentions

• FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2021

  For those looking for a no-censorship-ever-of-any-kind alternative, consider Status:

  https://status.im/get/

  If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.

  Relevant specs:

  https://specs.status.im/

  https://rfc.vac.dev/

  Relevant repos:

  https://github.com/status-im/status-react

  https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

  There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contacts lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.

  The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using the chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.

  1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.

  Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities features provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.

  The moderation mechanisms for communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:

  (1) Any user can create a community.

  (2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community, there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.

  (3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.

  Re: (3), running a Status node should be easy and incentivized.

  The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.

  That being said, the "easy" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:

  https://github.com/status-im/status-node

  Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.

  Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.