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My team is building Quiet, an alternative to team chat apps like Slack and Discord that works as you describe:

https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme

> Granted, sending a message would require all parties to be online at the same time, but there could be a set of relay servers to hold messages until they get fetched.

We actually do a bit better than this! We use a gossip network (libp2p gossipsub) so all peers don't have to connect directly, and a CRDT over a private IPFS network so that everyone in a community eventually syncs all messages. As long as there's a continuity of online peers, the availability of messages is the same as a central server, and with a few Android users in the mix it's pretty easy to get to that level of continuity.

(The battery impact of staying connected all the time on Android isn't as bad as you'd think, and we haven't even begun to optimize it.)

And yes, it builds on the maturity of Tor rather than trying to roll its own onion routing layer as Session is doing. Quiet is still a work in progress, but we've been dogfooding the desktop app for over a yearn now as our main team chat, and the Android app for a little less than that. We're working on iOS now, which is... tricky. But we're hopeful.




That's really interesting and I hope the project gets continued support.




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