A New Kind of Instant Messaging
tox.chatWhether it's corporations or governments, there's just too much digital spying going on today. Tox is an easy to use application that connects you with friends and family without anyone else listening in. While other big-name services require you to pay for features, Tox is totally free and comes without advertising — forever.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about privacy minded chat clients on here but a search did not bring up Tox. I have been delving into the Gemini protocol ( https://gemini.circumlunar.space/) and a few folks there have listed Tox for contact. Anyone have thoughts on this?
It’s encrypted, peer to peer, FOSS, and requires no signup.
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I saw this a while ago when I was searching high and low for a messenger to switch to from Element (didn’t end up switching to anything). I like a lot of things about it, but don’t like that it can’t support offline delivery or multi-device. I think no messenger without those features will ever take off because too many people demand them. In fact I remember that in group chats, it won’t even do the faux offline messaging that it does for 1-to-1 chats! I don’t know why but that was the biggest deal breaker for my own use case. I hope they eventually fix that, there’s no reason they can’t.
I also don’t like that it has moderation features, which feel really out of place to me in a peer to peer system. I don’t want that kind of social hierarchy in a context that more or less inherently assumes all participants are trusted. Moderation only makes sense in public forums IMO.
There’s also at least one security cocern: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 Though the people pointing it out were pretty toxic and really exaggerated its severity :(
Despite all this, if offline messaging and multi-device aren’t requirements for you, I’d say Tox is a great option, maybe the best option.
I’m proud to hear you’re getting into Gemini, by the way :) I first heard of it a while ago but recently got really onboard and I’m working on converting my own website to Gemini.
Thanks for the insight! No offline messages is a big drawback, however aTox from Fdroid seems to have the service running all the time unless you kill it. Battery drain aside I think this could help. No multi device support is a big one though.
Yeah Gemini is cool. Big gopher hole right now for me.
By “doesn’t support multi-device” you mean it doesn’t have syncing between devices?
That’s kind of a big deal for me.
Yeah, I mean that. The design of the protocol makes it basically impossible to implement. This is one of the core drawbacks of peer to peer compared to federation.
right yeah I figured as much. I don’t know if there really is a way to do multi device with p2p.