Lightning Talk: Quiet! How to build a modern messaging app without servers, and why.
Topic
Quiet! How to build a modern messaging app without servers, and why.
Description
When free and open source software depends on a server, it requires users to have a server or have a trusted relationship with someone who does. This dependence has dramatically limited free software's usefulness and its revolutionary power, so it should be avoided whenever possible. In this talk I'll demo a Slack & Discord alternative we're building called Quiet (https://www.tryquiet.org) that does not depend on servers but is still reliable and easy to use, show how we did it, and define a broad class of software (collaboration tools and online public libraries) that could be built in the same way.
Space Requirements
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Electricity -
Monitor
What we'll learn
- a framework for thinking about why server dependence is such a problem
- a bit about my project Quiet, an alternative to Slack and Discord that doesn't depend on servers but is still easy to use, and how it works
- a general approach to building server-independent apps that works for building both collaboration tools (Slack, Trello, Figma, Miro, Asana, etc.) and online public libraries (public data sets curated by groups of volunteers and paid staff.)
Relevant links
Edited by Holmes Wilson