Briar was nice for chatting when you only have Bluetooth connectivity. Messaging otherwise is subpar
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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Until they rework Forums and Groups, it's going to be dead in the water from a usability perspective. Both Forums and Groups work with threads and not messages. And when messages are added as replies, the contents of the group chat bloat up in unpredictable ways, until it becomes more or less unusable.
I wish I could, but desktop application is limited in functionality and I don't know how to make the mobile app function properly (Waydroid doesn't allow bluetooth use). I don't have a mobile device I can make as private as my desktop, so I would not want to have my chats there.
Solid choice as long as you don't mind the trade offs. If you are actually going to use it setup a mailbox.
Honestly Briar feels more like a social media app that a encrypted messager.
I even used it while traveling with friends. We couldn't have our seats together in the airplane and the capability to chat and shitpost over bluetooth securely was kinda nice without annoying everyone.
My biggest annoyance is the inability to migrate a profile and the existing chats across devices, even though that's good security-wise.
I've used it for the exact same purpose, great minds think alike. It's perfect for that scenario given there's no internet.
I just don't use it much otherwise because apps like Signal are far easier to move my friends and family on to and they're more than good enough. The metadata privacy Tor would provide would give me a lot of peace of mind but I know it'll never happen.
It's great, it does exactly what it says it does. Including using slot of battery power.
Killed my brand-new phone's power cell in about six hours. Kind of impressive, really.
I've been using it for comms with some friends and family when we're out of conventional network range. It works great, the pairing process is a bit of a barrier for securitu-muggles, but it works perfectly.
My only annoyance is that I can't run the mailbox program on a regular Linux/docker server.
its possible to run it on a raspberry pi tho
AFAIK it's only available as an android application. But I haven't looked into compiling it locally or anything. It might he possible.
Strange, isn't it? I wish they would set up mailboxes in a way that would allow me to host it for a few family members like I would a Jellyfin server
Edit: Here's a guide on how to run it as a service
https://retiolus.net/posts/briar-mailbox-server-cli-installation-guide/