What do you guys, gals and enbies think about Briar?
It's a p2p communication program but for once has a different approach.
From wiki:
>…communications with no centralized servers and minimal reliance on external infrastructure. Messages can be transmitted through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, over the internet via Tor or removable storage, such as USB sticks.
Anyway, seems like a neat idea but maybe I'm missing something
I used to use Briar for a while. it's pretty neat. for those who don't know, its main selling point is that it is metadata resistant. its main downside when I used it was battery usage, because it had to stay connected to Tor. message delivery is also an issue, because both users have to be online. in a group chat this is easier, but it's still necessary for a critical mass of people to be online for messages to percolate
Boomp
Whenever one of these decentralized peer-to-peer web3 projects comes up, the most important question to ask is "How does it do peer discovery?" because this is a pretty difficult problem to solve without a central server. I looked into it and apparently Briar just piggybacks on the Tor network and uses that for peer discovery, and Tor itself uses a set of directory servers for peer discovery, so it's not exactly fully decentralized. Also I'm not so sure about how the Tor people feel about projects like this; the network is already slow enough as it is without everyone and their brother using Tor as the backend for their Web3 projects especially when all their software is set up to run Tor in client mode by default and not relay mode, thereby using the Tor network's resources and giving nothing back.