Posted by ristello 8 hours ago
I saw it shared at dweb camp and it seemed like a pretty long term serious project for P2P.
Unfortunately the security/usability tradeoffs mean it never was going to hit Whatsapp levels of use, but it certainly fills an important niche.
Pretty much every app I have has delayed notifications, and no matter of battery optimization settings can fix it.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/power/app_mgmt#testing-...
I wonder if this setting could help Briar, and if so, whether an equivalent could be built in to their app packaging so users wouldn't have to fiddle with it.
I don't know exactly what the option is called but since Android 8 there is at least a toggle there per app. Later versions have lots more settings.
Unused apps also indeed go in different App Standby buckets, which while it shouldn't affect FCM notifications, it does on some older android versions (https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/power/power-...)
If you're not using FCM, well you're limited to having to check for notifications yourself, either within doze windows, or by registering a foreground service that keeps your app alive and checking.
If the goal is messaging that avoids government spying or censorship its a lost cause - the government would simply compel Apple to pull the app in their jurisdiction.
Also, how do you avoid leaking the sender? You can avoid giving Apple that information by routing the notification through a server, but then that server would know the sender and recipient.
because without such a critical mass of normal users you get something like tor or grapheneos that the state begins to associate with people engaging in unsavoury activity
Can the Starlink radio be sniffed? If so, it might act like a beacon, a tell-tale sign (especially, in countries where Starlink is illegal).
Any service like Briar that wants to sit atop base smartphones will need to deal with this tension. A fallback is to poll intermittently for new messages, which when tuned correctly can indeed be fairly battery life forward. Of course then your messaging experience is lower bounded by your refresh interval. Modern smartphone OSes also will ruthlessly cut long-running connections in the face of power-save events on device.
In general I think an external radio that you connect your smartphone to via Bluetooth, like Meshcore or Meshtastic, is a better experience overall than simply using a smartphone. Dedicated radios keep smartphone batteries topped up, and having the option to setup an antenna means that if you happen to be in an area where permanent radio setup is plausible, you can lean on good site characteristics, antennas, and filters. It’s hard for a government to ban radios altogether and ISM-ish band devices have a variety of uses in pretty much any developing or developed country (often used in small things like meters or monitors.) And for folks who just some off-grid data capabilities, this approach offers high flexibility without the burden of licensing.
For folks considering going into this, I suggest joining Meshtastic or Amateur Radio communities. I find the further you get from amateur radio or networking communities (mesh* communities have a mix of folks and some can have pretty poor understanding of how radios work), the more the information becomes unreliable and more suffuse with political/social goals than matters like understanding signal propagation or congestion. If you’re in a developed country, Amazon likely has all you need to get started with the Mesh* world of LoRa UHF radios.
It could if we’d never broken the full end to end principle and put stateful firewalls and NAT in front of everything, but that ship has sailed. All net connections require keepalive or a firewall will close them. This is even true these days in the cloud for the most part unless your machines are “naked” VMs directly on the globally routed Internet.
This is actually non-trivial. There's an app I was working on where I wanted to have a local first mode that allowed people to use the app for free without an account and there was also a cloud hosted version that allowed for team collaboration, etc.
For this kind of thing to work chunks of the app essentially need to be written twice. So, not fun.
BLE/LoRa/radio/internet mesh with reticulum that combines chat, social and torrents over NOSTR (decentralized protoocol).
Still beta, around August should be stable.
I'm a dinosaur but you remind those complaining in the 90s that Turbo Pascal wasn't real programming because it was too easy to copy code and compile.
I don't have a team of developers nor funding to hire them. AI amplifies by 26 times what I can do in a year. It was never about the code, what matters is what you do with it.