Comm App - Self-Hosted Alternative to Signal, Wire, WhatsApp, Telegram

[robi]

Comm

Comm is an E2E-encrypted messaging app. You can think of it as Signal with an IRC-like federated community layer.

• DMs and group chats are E2EE between devices using pairwise Double Ratchet sessions initiated via X3DH.
• Communities, which consist of a tree structure of channels, are hosted on federated user-run backends that we call keyservers. Communication is encrypted via TLS.

Learn more at comm.app!

Repo structure

The client apps and keyserver layer are mostly written in Flow-typed Javascript. These projects are organized in a monorepo structure using Yarn Workspaces.

• native contains the code for the React Native app, which supports both iOS and Android.
• keyserver contains the code for the Node/Express server. This includes the application server for the communities layer (the "keyserver"), and can be configured to serve web and landing as well (see below).
• web contains the code for the React desktop website.
• landing contains the code for the Comm landing page.
• lib contains code that is shared across multiple other workspaces, including most of the Redux stack that is shared across native/web.

Comm's backend services are centralized and never touch plaintext data. They are written in Rust and deployed with Terraform to AWS. These projects are organized in a monorepo structure using Cargo Workspaces.

• services contains the various different backend services.
• shared contains gRPC and protobuf definitions, and shared Rust libraries.

I am in touch with the developer.

[humptydumpty]

If this gets packaged and we self-host it, all msgs go through our servers and not AWS or another 3rd party, right?

[robi]

@humptydumpty yes, that is correct.