Retroshare.cc - a fully FLOSS decentralized encrypted client with forums, boards, channels, contacts, chat, mail, file sharing, TOR/I2P friendly, and VoIP. No censorship. No corporate system. No central servers. Is this the next step?

submitted by JasonCarswellDAT Mod from (retroshare.cc)

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[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

My Initial Review

After delving into RetroShare I have mixed feelings.

4/10 : GUI Flow

The interface is confusing, not well planned out, and not presented well. It's like they just kept adding features to it. Some things are customizable and some are not. Some fonts are too big and others too small. Some things offer 4 visual modes (ie "Chat": bubbles, compact bubbles, standard, standard compact) while there's nothing compact about "Activity". Having a 2 dark modes is good but neither is adequate.

The GUI is all over the place. Some stuff offers icons, buttons, drop-down menus, tabs, tables, etc and some stuff there is zero indication that there are right click menu options.

7/10 : Features

Many features in one place rather than many clients/apps. Many seem to overlap functionality thus adding to the confusion. The features are called "tabs" but are icons/buttons horizontally across the top (option: left vertical). They are:

  • Home
  • Network
  • People
  • Chat
  • Mail
  • Files
  • Channels
  • Forums
  • Boards
  • FeedReader
  • RetroChess
  • Activity
  • Preferences
  • Quit

Also:

  • Links (ie. Posts, Feed Reader, etc.) get opened in your external default browser - pros and cons.
  • VoIP doesn't have a tab for some reason (yet chess does).
  • No wiki.
  • Limited save/archive/expiry controls. Because it's decentralized I will be re-sharing everything I have, kind of like bittorrent.
  • No way to mail to external email addresses.
  • No way to archive mail, feeds, forum, etc.

I could be wrong about some of this, my first limited impression.

The Network, People, Chat, Mail, etc sections are not intuitive and confusing with the contacts list. I love that the mail has custom tags that can be used like folders to organize and sort your stuff. We have nothing like that on SaidIt.

In the "Boards" you can post a link, image, or post. Only the image has a thumbnail. :( The voting is strange and awkward as are the comments and the layout. Boards seem to be more like what we have on SaidIt - easily confused with Channels (video), Forums (discussions), and FeedReader (typical feed aggregator IMO).

FeedReader seems very promising. 2 types: Forum or Local Feed (I'm assuming I can feed into the 3 forums I made but I can only do local feed so far. (https://infogalactic.com/info/SaidIt#RSS_Feeds). I've set mine up to get the SaidIt Hot Posts, New Posts, and New Comments. "Authentication (not yet supported)" seems to imply that we might soon be able to login to SaidIt via Retroshare. The feeds can be stored for a standard (not mentioned) or variable time (I plugged in 999999 days). Update interval standard (not mentioned) or custom in minutes. They downloaded the first 100, which I think may be standard either for feed readers or for SaidIt's RSS.

The problem with feed aggregators is that it's just another step between you and the source. It's one thing if you have many feeds from different sites - but SaidIt already IS an aggregator. Thus it's a hat on a hat in this case.

7/10 : Options

Very good but not great. All the features and more have settings you can customize but each is a mixed bag, from basic to advanced, but not expert. Again in somewhat confusing arrangements.

9/10 : FLOSS Decentralized

Not only is it open-source and decentralized - it doesn't even need any websites. I don't give a 10/10 because I don't know what I don't know and maybe there are other issues with it, maybe not.

Also, one critical universal problem with decentralization is that for wide adoption people need to have plug-n-play, basic, advanced, and expert options available, IMO. Most people won't have time for the learning curve and dealing with the 4/10 GUI flow.

I suspect most users comfortable with Reddit and SaidIt would be too lazy to bother to learn this new desktop client (not sure if it's also a smart phone app). If the flow were better they might dig it for the decentralization and/or other features. Needing an external browser to read/see links may be a deal breaker though as some may not like switching between them.

27/40 : Conclusion

I can't help but think of what someone once said about starting up a new luxury car company (Tesla, Saturn, Lexus or something, I forget), something to the effect: It's not enough to just have a product that's a little better because they are established, our product needs to be universally vastly superior in order to break into the market and survive.

Sadly, IMO, Retroshare is very neat but not enough. Yet it's not without value and much potential. It's a neat side toy. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and it's the next great thing.

Regardless, I'm going to keep playing with RetroShare and Session for a while longer. PM me if you want to join our exploratory activities there.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Sadly android support is just an old experimental chat.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Bummer. I'm guessing that may be old too.

I wonder if this thing is trying to be too many things at once.

That reminds me of the current state of browsers... I often wonder if it might be better to have many different specialty apps with "bridges" to each other and occasionally "frames" within sandboxes. Perhaps the main app would be the "bridges".

Or maybe I'm just talking out my ass and pretending that inverting to flip "addons" on its head makes any difference.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I hate having a specialty app for most things.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Thanks for this, Jason. I'll put it on my list of platforms to watch for further development, as it looks like it could very well evolve into what we actually need, in a form all can readily use.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Also interesting:

Aether

https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/

I like their "Real Prime Directive":

Act fast and chomp down on posts that just haven't gotten the basic idea.

Why? Vast majority of people are genuinely good, pleasant humans. But a very small number of misbehavers can make any place not so great, even when almost all of the people in the place is still well-meaning.

Vast majority of people also have no concept of just how much effort and vigilance it takes to keep a community a pleasant place, or how efficiently an awful post can ruin a lot of people's days. The work you do is valuable.

Aether attempts to fix that by making your actions visible, and in the front and center. People will see just how much work you're doing to keep your corner of the world an enjoyable place.

Similar content to SaidIt and Voat. Seems good but the GUI is for phones with meh graphics. They're heavy on the ephemeral aspect which I don't like either.

AKASHA

https://akasha.org/

It's a social media thing with Ethereum and IPFS, however that may work. It's still vapourware and I'm still too early even after a few years as they're still in development.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ping: /u/LarrySwinger2, /u/Horrux, /u/SaidOverRed

[–]SaidOverRed 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Well JC, do you use it?

[–]LarrySwinger2 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

We're testing it now.

[–]SaidOverRed 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Let me know how it goes and how many people you have. You'll need more than 2 to test the only 'neighbors' know IP addresses thing.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm impressed with it. I like that it's more complex. I'm also not thrilled about having to learn a new platform. I've only started and have to catch up to the other guys. I'm still confused about some things. I expect others will find both too. But I think it may be vastly superior and worth it. It seems to me more akin to Thunderbird (email/feeds) but with a LOT of other things. I love that you can organize your shit much better than just long lists (feeds, messages, saved, etc.) that are cumbersome to navigate. I still have to learn about it's archiving features (important IMO), and wonder how much can it handle before it starts to choke (ie. browsers with lots of tabs, Thunderbird with thousands of emails, etc.). Of course there are features that I don't see nor expect to, but maybe, and I'm sure there's also much more to be discovered.

PLUS: Plugins can be made. Bots? Maybe ways to crossover between SaidIt, WikiSpooks, PeerTube, etc? I dunno.

There's also Lemmy/Lenny, and other stuff, worth checking out too.

[–]LarrySwinger2 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

I take the credit for discovering it. It looks fantastic with all the features that it has. Currently testing it with people. Wanna try it out with me? PM me for my ID.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Sounds awesome, I'll get on board too. I'd like to know who is behind it however. Any info on that?

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Indeed! Thanks for finding it!

It seems like a big step up, right out of the package - if people can learn it. I have torrenting clients that I don't even know how half of it works. This seems like that but more practical and socially oriented - yet technical for the security minded. With a little practice I'm sure it will become second nature.

It doesn't even need a website.

I just looked, and it has active development with 63 guys. https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare (By comparison qBittorrent has 201 guys. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent) They use C++ Python JavaScript Shell PHP - all Greek to me. I'd ask DioJr about it but... /u/d3rr, does this seem okay and/or interesting to you?

I also learned about PalTalk this week from my neighbour who used it 15 years ago. I looked it up and in the screenshots seems similar, but it's proprietary and will less features. Obviously it would have been different back then too. Interesting history of being patent trolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paltalk

[–]LarrySwinger2 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

The macOS version from their website didn't work for me, but v0.6.6 does. You still need to install libnettle using Homebrew first, though.

[–]JasonCarswellDAT Mod[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I have RetroShare Version: 0.6.6-0-g751fffc30 on Win7. Worked first try.

I should get that Mint box working later today. Maybe I should add RetroShare too? I don't know what libnettle and Homebrew are, yet.