Privacy

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Berty Messenger for iOS and Android - Zero Trust Open Source Peer-to-Peer Messenger based on IPFS protocol (berty.tech)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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** Now in Android and iOS app stores **

No Face, No Name, No Number, No SIM card, No Internet! Berty is a messenger that doesn’t require any of your personal data or network connection (using Bluetooth Low Energy BLE). All conversations are encrypted with end-to-end encryption, in a fully distributed network.

It is a peer-to-peer messenger with no servers, no cloud - your data is only stored on the device where Berty is installed and used. No one would be able to access the data or shut the app down, not even the developers.

Being P2P, it means the IP address needs to be available to route messaging, but their site explains a bit about how they've tried to mask this. Whilst Briar is an excellent alternative, it is still Android only. The closest alternative is maybe Jami, but it lacks a non-Internet Bluetooth alternative if I recall correctly. Interestingly, Berty also can use Airdrop (iOS to iOS) and Android's Nearby as alternative protocols.

You can share your details and add contacts via a QR code, public key, or an invite link. It is currently available on both iOS and Android, with desktop clients to follow.

See https://berty.tech/

#technology #messenger #berty #P2P #IPFS #privacy

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

berty uses gomobile-ipfs, which is a version of libp2p adapted to run on mobile, therefore much more efficient, but also less capabilities iirc; gomobile-ipfs is rather efficient in my experience, i run two apps that use it and don't notice any unusual battery drain

the reason to run a full ipfs node is in order to pin(upload)/download content to ipfs, you have to run one if you want to do that; you can sort of get around it by using the ipfs-http-api, but that defeats the purpose of using ipfs, as utilising the http gateways makes the entire thing censorable and centralised

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Interesting. Maybe I am underestimating the capabilities of modern smartphones. But libp2p has to keep a connection at all times in the background, right? For connectivity?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

libp2p is actually a stack of different networking technologies: different components activate depending on whether you need them at the moment or not

there are some ways to implement messaging that require both peers to be online at the moment of message transmission, and there are some ways to implement messaging so that the receiving peer can be offline, i'm not exactly sure how berty implements it, you can surely get a exact answer to that on their discord :)