Quiet - Serverless alternative to Discord / Slack / Zulip / Revolt / Signal / Telegram

[robi]

Quiet

Encrypted p2p team chat with no servers, just Tor.
Downloads | How it Works | Features | Threat Model | Mission | FAQ | Developer setup

Quiet is an alternative to team chat apps like Slack, Discord, and Element that does not require trusting a central server or running one's own. In Quiet, all data syncs directly between a team's devices over Tor with no server required.

NOTE: Quiet is not audited and should not be used when privacy and security are critical. It lacks basic features and probably won't replace your Slack or Discord yet. That said, it works surprisingly well and we use it daily as a Slack replacement.

Quiet is for fans of software freedom, decentralization and privacy tech, and for anyone craving a future where humanity can collaborate effectively online without trusting our communities, networks, and data to giant corporations.

Quiet is written (mostly) in TypeScript, with Electron and React Native frontends, and welcomes outside contributions! See: Contributing to Quiet

How it works

While apps like Slack, Discord, and Signal use central servers, Quiet syncs messages directly between a team's devices, over Tor, with no server required.

Each group of people (Quiet calls them "communities") gets their own insular network, so that data from one community never touches the devices of Quiet users in other communities. Not even in encrypted form!

Message syncing is taken care of by a project called OrbitDB, which works like a mashup of Git, a gossip protocol, and BitTorrent; it broadcasts new messages, syncs the latest messages, and fetches files. Syncing means that users typically receive all messages sent while they were offline.

Invites, access, and usernames are granted by a community owner, i.e. whoever creates the community. The owner hands out an "invitation code" which invitees use to connect to the owner's device, register a username, and get a standard cryptographic certificate so they can prove to other peers they're part of the community.

See our FAQ for answers to common questions and a comparison of Quiet with similar apps.

Getting started

To try Quiet, download the latest release for your platform (.dmg for macOS, .exe for Windows, etc.) and install it in the normal way. Then create a community and open the community's settings to invite members.

If you'd like to help develop Quiet, see Contributing to Quiet.

Features

• Team Chat - Create a "community" for your team or organization and invite members.
• End-to-end Encryption - All data is encrypted end-to-end between member devices.
• Channels - Organize chats in Slack-like channels.
• Images - Send and receive images, with copy/paste, drag & drop, and image previews.
• Notifications - Get desktop notifications for new messages, with optional sounds.
• Desktop Apps - Desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
• No email or phone number required - Unlike Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal, no email or phone number is required to create or join a community.

Planned (but still-missing) features

• Files - Send and receive files of unlimited size!
• Direct Messages - Send and receive direct messages that are encrypted to the recipient and unreadable by other community members.
• Mobile Apps - Join communities on Android or iOS, in addition to desktop.
• Mentions - Send @ mentions that notify other users.
• Removal - Remove users from your community.
• User Profiles - Add an avatar or bio.
• Message Deletion - Delete individual messages and set timed deletion rules ("disappearing messages") for the community.
• Status - See your own connection status and the online status of other users.
• Emojis & Reactions - Send emojis with emojicodes, and react with emojis.
• Multiple Communities - Join multiple communities, like you would in Slack or Discord.
• Keyboard Controls - Navigate and generally do stuff without using the mouse.
• Account Recovery - Recover owner accounts from a backup phrase.
• Private channels - Create private channels with multiple members that are unreadable to the community at large.

https://tryquiet.com
https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/

Nice idea, and looks like this will serve as a precedent for other systems built in similar ways.

[jdaviescoates]

Reminds me a bit of Manyverse:

https://www.manyver.se/

Oooh, and there is now an Android client too! Hadn't spotted that.

Oooh, and a while back @rmdes packaged a Secure Scuttlebutt apps too https://forum.cloudron.io/post/43713

So now I'm really wanting that app to find its way into the app store so I can try using Manyverse with it!

[robi]

From a recent response from the dev to an issue:

If you wanted to run Quiet in headless mode that would be fairly easy to do, as this is how our integration tests work: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/tree/develop/packages/integration-tests

Also, feel free to email me and I can invite you to our existing Quiet community, if you'd like to talk about this idea further! h@tryquiet.org

This should allow for packaging and testing on Cloudron!

Would be really nice to have one private self-hosted non-centralized P2P messaging service with mobile apps on Cloudron.