I’ve been looking for the perfect modern messenger for a while. Something that acts like a torrent for chat history, bypassing central servers entirely while keeping the contacts opt-in. I recently stumbled upon Keet and won’t lie, I’m slightly enamoured. It actually feels like it truly wants to be a serverless, distributed messenger at the conceptual level.
It’s not perfect though…
The Good:
- Real P2P
- Surprisingly fast for a DHT-based system.
The Bad (and why I’m hesitating):
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I want to self-host an “archive node” (a blind peer) to seed chat history for when my phone is offline. Right now, there is no official Docker image or headless mode. You seemingly have to hack together a container running a full desktop GUI just to keep a peer online. For a protocol built on distributed data, the lack of an easy “always-on” relay is a massive oversight. Ugh!
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It ignores platform design conventions. There’s no Material 3 Expressive adoption; it ignores predictive back gestures and navigation standards. It feels like using an iOS app port or a generic web-wrapper, which is disappointing to say the least.
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It’s source available rather than open source.
Where did you see the source code?
You’re right, that bullet point is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Hypercore is open source, but the mobile client itself is a black box. We’re supposed to trust that the React Native blob is actually using the open-source libraries correctly.
BTW, I fucking hate every single React Native Android app. They’re always absolutely shite.
Yep. No such thing as perfect but I think SimpleX is the closest thing. Biggest problems there being dropped messages, no UnifiedPush, VC funding, and an alt-right developer.
The lack of multi-client support is also a major issue for me.