meant to ask this last week when i was moping over our Discordian future but yeah. i stumbled upon a longstanding, decentralized open source app called RetroShare that uses a peer-to-peer ("friend-to-friend") networking model to implement a whole bunch of the social features we run to Discord for. i see just one other Cohost post about it and they explain it much better than i would:
The alternative seems obvious; instead of everybody connecting to a billionaire's data center to share photos, video, and status updates, everybody should be able to connect directly to the people they care about.
That's the idea behind Retroshare's friend-to-friend networking protocol, which also includes end-to-end encryption for privacy and friend-of-a-friend routing that enables anyone on the network to reach anyone else so long as they have a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style connection to someone on their friend list.
The open-source app, which you can find at https://retroshare.cc (desktop-only), uses that protocol to provide all the features you'd expect from a modern social network; Direct messaging, group chat (with sticker support for the furries =3), Twitter-style status updates, media-sharing channels, discussion forums, file sharing, even plugins for voice and video chat.
here are its homepage and its documentation. doesn't this sound kind of exciting?? likely not perfect but a welcome change from the Discord status quo? of course it's hard to get everyone using a new platform, but curious about your thoughts.
update: tried it some with viv, it is rough af. functional but the UI and such would send most people screaming back to discord in 5 minutes 😔
if you want to try retroshare i created a "public forum"
here's the link:
retroshare://forum?name=eggbug%20public%20forum&id=0c9f96f1fafc695bb3a3b24e237d4437
note that i created this on my laptop so I have no idea how persistent it will be if my laptop sleeps. let's find out together! (please set your expectations accordingly)
also my retroshare id if you want to add me as a friend is ABB3qPpAhKW9ye8G2dQU9B2YAxSL0rpT8CMHyg6eobY/qnKOSU6ZUAEKdml2aXJpZGlhbpMGLzpNZN5ykgZEy6Wu3nIEA76NqQ==
it didn't work until i turned upnp back on at my router
display names are deeply confusing
but you can change your font and color and the other person will see it (in 'chat rooms' but not an IM for some reason)
regardless there is something charming to me about it. however i cannot recommend it to people who are not computer touchers
