Announcing DarkFi App alpha release! Featuring the first add-on of the DarkFi super-app: anonymous p2p chat via DarkIRC Chat Network.
This is our first major user-facing release. You can now access DarkFi with a single click.
The chat is fully p2p and strongly anonymous. Tor is opt-in for network-level anonymity. All messages are fully unlinkable which is a feature not found anywhere else.
This makes it the world's MOST anonymous chat.
It's an alpha release so expect bugs. The UI has been written completely from scratch rather than using any existing UI framework. This gives us the total power to deliver the complete dark forest future.
This is just the beginning. The chat is the first step toward the DarkFi super-app, where you access all apps like wallet, DAO, filesharing and trading through a single interface. The app will contain an in-app store where you can download p2p add-ons. This is DarkFi's answer to the broken web-frontend and Metamask paradigm.
Today's release is fully cross-platform for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. It's the same app across all platforms and is fully customizable. Add-ons run the same everywhere. This is the power of making our own UI by hand with love.
Chat running on Linux
The channel select menu. Green channels have new messages.
Download
Visit the download page for more help information. We have builds for Linux, Android, Windows and Mac. iPhone is coming in the next release.
Features
Today's release is fully p2p on both mobile and desktop. There are no centralized backends or servers. Messages cannot be traced to the user that sent them. There is no persistent identity. You can change your nick as often as you want. You can also configure Tor to connect to the p2p network anonymously without any identifying info.
The chat supports multiple public rooms. You can now access all public channels on the network.
Rename yourself with the
/nickcommand
Rename your nick using the command: /nick hacker.
Tor support for network level anonymity is opt-in. In the last release, it ran over Tor by default, but it was unreliable for mobile users on poor connectivity. This should be fixed once Tor stablizes Arti, the pluggable Tor implementation that DarkFi uses. We also have plans to integrate Nym in the future once a number of issues with their SDK are fixed.
For instructions on enabling Tor, check the download page.
Different stages for the network status indicator
Network status indicator is on the top right.
Selecting emojis on MacOS
We also have an emoji picker! You can even customize the defaults or add new fonts. Check the release notes for details.
Fractional UI scaling. On Android, use the 2-finger pinch gesture, while on
desktop zoom/in and out with Ctrl+Equals (=) and Ctrl+Minus (-) keys.
A new design paradigm
The entire crypto space has become stagnant. There is zero creativity, just repetitive copying of each other.
We decided to chart a new path.
People told us it was a crazy plan.
But we want to create a genuinely new experience. It should look and feel like the science-fiction dark forest future we want to live in.
Currently most projects in crypto:
- Use centralized hosted web frontends for the "dapps".
- Use centralized browser wallets with poor UI/ UX that spy on users.
- Make separate phone wallets for Android and iPhone, usually lacking smart contract ability.
- Laptop/desktop support is an afterthought if it's even considered.
- Zero commandline support or APIs, which means there is no organic community ecosystem. Users have no real power to participate unless through programs run by marketers.
To fix this:
- DarkFi is ditching the browser completely.
- We're creating a single, unified super-app.
- It must be the SAME app across ALL platforms.
- The design is highly extensible with user-customizable UI and themes.
- Using pluggable app-on's, apps can be distributed in a fully p2p manner without hosting centralized website frontends.
All of this means:
- Devs do not host anything. They just write code but the add-on is hosted fully p2p and anonymously.
- Devs do not have to sign up to Google or Apple app stores either for browser or phone builds.
- Nobody is required to host an RPC just so users can access their app.
- There are no more privacy violations (no add-on store, no browser plugin, no RPC or dev hosting the frontend). Software runs locally on your device.
- One single consistent experience. Write once, deploy everywhere.
- Full support for third party ecosystem of devs through APIs and CLI.
- App is fully customizable with themes and plugins to suit your desired look and feel. Users have full power over the software they run.
Sync Tech
The chat uses a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based architecture. With this type of architecture, each event links to the currently open tips, which folds out any divergences in the history. When two nodes produce competing events that are both unlinked (called tips), then the next event will link to both of them combining the two competing views into a single unified graph.
The DAG is fast, secure and robust. Nodes with different views of the p2p network topology eventually reach consistency. Divergences are quickly resolved and integrated, which is appropriate for coordination tools like chat.
The DAG ensures that all nodes are able to sync the entire history and reach the same consistent state. Forks eventually reach the main tree, which triggers a cascade of events propagating to the entire p2p network. Events that are broadcast successfully are guaranteed to be part of the history.
Pluggable P2P Transports
The p2p network is transport agnostic. It can be configured to switch between various transports. The current supported list is: TCP, encrypted TCP (default), Tor and UNIX sockets (not for Windows). Nym support is experimental and disabled by default pending updates to their SDK. We also support socks5 proxy.
This list can be easily extended with additional transport plugins. The p2p architecture is modular and scalable using full parallelisation and async features. Network protocols run in parallel without any blocking. The stack is optimized and performant.
Next Release
It's still early. We've reached the first milestone: DarkFi super-app alpha.
The next release will focus on fixing bugs, performance tweaks and making the software stable. It will be the beta release.
We will improve initial sync on load. You open the app and it will sync with the network very quickly.
Our next main feature will be support for private DMs and secret channels.
We also plan a settings manager like "about:config" in web browsers and a node explorer to visualize the p2p network.
Anyone who ran the pre-alpha version will see this release is easily a 10x improvement. The next release will improve another 10x, and so on with each release after that. It's up only from here.
Let there be dark.
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