Berty is a secure peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access, cellular data or trust in the network

AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 86 points –
GitHub - berty/berty: Berty is a secure peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access, cellular data or trust in the network
github.com
11

I don't understand why a privacy respecting app would use discord for their community. I subscribed to their mailing list and look forward to any updates.

I also think that using the phone number to find friends, as done by signal, is really important for mainstream adoption.

This is exceptional. This truly looks like the perfect decentralised chat service.

I really hope this takes off, but knowing most people, it will likely remain niche for a long while till something like Signal falls (which I don't wish for to happen btw).

Is there a whitepaper or anything else that explains the details of the privacy measures? I skimmed through the README, but I'd like more detail.

Thank you for bringing this to the open. I hope that as time goes on, this gets more attention and gets adopted by the community (I can't force my family to use anything other than corporate spyware, and I personally have no need for chat apps, but I hope someone does).

Thanks

How does it work? Is this similar to Briar?

I don’t know anything about it but Berty uses the Wesh protocol. Here’s documentation from their website if you’d like to read into it.

Berty Wesh protocol

Looks interesting, is the android app available any other way than the playstore? On the github page I can only see files for windows and linux, maybe I am missing something obvious here.

Looks very promising, but probably and unfortunately will lack mass adoption

I just tried it as I was intrigued, but it didn't go so well.
The first thing it did was complain about not being able to connect to its notifications server, so I couldn't enable notifications... even looked into the app permissions and there was nothing preventing it from pushing notifications.
Then I wanted to see which OSS was used and that link didn't work. (possible license violation?)
After that I wanted to try the mode where you can communicate locally through BLE and all that. Enabling that feature causes the app to just crash when opening it.