I recently stumbled upon Keet, which is a peer to peer messaging app with video calls and file sharing.
This app has a lot going for it:
- The user experience is really good
Free and open sourceEDIT: the UI of Keet in closed atm, but the underlying P2P building blocks are open- Privacy friendly (no datacentre, server or middleman between you and the people you are talking to)
- Better quality since there’s no throttling of traffic
- No file size limit
I’m baffled that this app seems like a well kept secret, so I just wanted to share it with you guys.
To me, peer to peer technology seems really interesting because it addresses the root cause of many of the harms that plagues the modern day internet: surveillance, platform silos, the market dominance of multi-national tech-conglomerates, energy usage of datacentres, etc.
What do you think? Can P2P be the solution to these problems?
The biggest downside with P2P on a mobile device is it needs to run in the background all the time, and constantly uses small amounts of data making connections.
So far battery and data usage is ok, but we’ll see after some more testing
The other issue is if you’re offline with no internet service and you come back online, you may not ever see any messages sent during that time.
Seems like they’ve got that covered
Payments Built In As your app grows, Holepunch lets you evolve into a business without compromises. With Bitcoin Lightning and USDt micropayments built-in, it’s easy to implement and use powerful paid features in apps. Peers control their own data, including how it’s bought and sold. The days of tokens, ads, hidden incentives, and data harvesting are over.
No thank you
I’m no crypto fan or plan on using micropayments either, but if I don’t use it, where’s the harm?
Lightning is a steaming pile of horse shit. Anyone who thinks lightning is peer-to-peer is totally fooling themselves.
Well I agree with you that Lightning isn’t a magical piece of innovation that will scale Bitcoin to the masses. However you can use it p2p. There is no lie here. Is it easy to setup ? Is it easy to maintain ? Not really it’s not hard but it’s a entry barrier for sure.
A FOSS app focusing on privacy should be released on F-droid.
It’s not FOSS, it is somewhat open source but the licence is too restrictive to be Free(dom) Software
where is source code of keet?
it is not mentioned on site, I found their github https://github.com/holepunchto but I cannot find keet source here
He never said its Open Source and the feature fees explain why
This app has a lot going for it:
- Free and open source
I skimmed that text 3 times to be sure. Seems like it heavily oversaw it.
My bad, on the Pears homepage it says “Join the open-source P2P revolution”, so I assumed that was the case.
Someone asked the same question in the community group chat. Seems like the UI for Keet is closed atm, the rest is open.
I dunno. P2P traffic always seems to overburden light users and it would indeed require the apps to always run in the background to relay the traffic. Although the idea seems compelling I wouldn’t install the software on a machine of mine.
I’m testing syncing, notification and battery usage now on a few devices to see how it behaves. So far, so good. It also lets you specify which type of user you are inviting, so that admins does the heavy lifting
