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by nfd 3779 days ago
A usable, secure messenger is a pretty important niche to fill. Cryptocat is a good concept (usability is important), but its implementation is flawed enough that it's worse than useless. With some TLC, better ground-up design, and through auditing? Pretty sweet. There isn't one messenger that fills every niche reasonably well (eg. Tox is fragmented and hasn't been audited as far as I'm aware, Jitsi is clunky and relies heavily on outside services, Retroshare requires an intricate knowledge of GPG, several other messengers sit over Tor which requires education, and libpurple is garbage, etc.).
3 comments

Ricochet sits over Tor and doesn't require much or any in the way of education. The implementation details and use of Tor is virtually invisible to the end-user. It's nothing like using public key encryption to send an email for instance, and more akin to AOL Instant Messenger from a user perspective.
I completely agree that a usable, secure messenger is important!
And a one that runs on mobile as well.
> Retroshare requires an intricate knowledge of GPG

This is not true. Pasting the certificate of your friend in a field does not require intricate knowledge of GPG.