Quiet

Quiet replaces Slack, Discord and Element for teams that would rather not trust a central server or run one. All data syncs directly between team devices, so there is no host to bill, subpoena or take offline.

Each group, which the project calls a community, gets its own insular network, so data from one never touches the devices of another. Peers connect through Tor onion services and sync with OrbitDB, an IPFS based CRDT behaving like a mix of Git, a gossip protocol and BitTorrent, so members receive what was sent while offline. The community owner acts as its certificate authority, handing out an invitation code that lets an invitee register a username and prove membership to other peers.

The shipped release covers the basics of a team chat app.

• Channels: organize conversations the way Slack does, with keyboard navigation between them.
• Files and images: send both without arbitrary size limits, with drag and drop and previews.
• Invite links: share one the way WhatsApp or Signal does, with no email address or phone number.
• Apps: desktop builds for Mac, Windows and Linux, plus a fully peer to peer Android app.
• Notifications: desktop alerts with optional sounds, though iOS has none yet.

The backend is Node.js, with Electron on desktop and React Native on mobile. Direct messages, mentions, reactions and search are named as planned rather than done, and communities hold roughly 30 to 100 members today. The maintainers state plainly that Quiet is unaudited and should not be used where privacy and security are critical.