![]() ![]() Most of the posts were in English, when I looked, with a couple in what I assume to be Russian but didn’t verify by trying to translate. No information on anybody, mind you, just the certificates. Predictably, since this is a forum specifically for certificate exchanges, the overwhelming majority of the messages are people offering up their certificates, with replies being people acknowledging that they did so. Right-click to open the forum or chat and, after it loads, you get what looks a lot like threaded e-mail, with replies indented underneath the original message. I now have access to one chat and one forum topic, both dedicated to RetroShare certificate exchanges to find people to interact with. In my case, I went to retroshare.ch, because it was the first working server I found. It automatically pastes the certificate, so you can click Next, then Finish. Back in RetroShare, click Add friends certificate.Copy the server’s certificate you get in exchange.Paste your certificate in to register with the server and submit.Copy your certificate from the RetroShare window’s Home screen.Find a RetroShare Chat Server (i.e., search).And obviously, if you just do that, your community should be as good as your social circle already is, because those are the people you’ll be involved with. The entire point is that your network must be deliberately built. So, there’s a lot going on, and odds are that no user will care about the majority of the interface. Links: This screen is another mystery, with buttons to “Subscribe” and “Submit a new Post,” but they’re disabled with no indication of how they’re fed.Forums: Sort of like the Mail screen, this allows access to forums on different nodes.It’s described something like a hashtag, but I’m not convinced there’s anything like a microblogging interface that would go with it. Channels: Even after reading the help screen, I’m admittedly still not sure what this is.Mail: A screen that looks like a typical e-mail client.People: This is basically your standard contact database.Network: Here, there are a few visualizations of how you’re connected with other users and people.Home: The program starts here, but there isn’t much to work with, just a certificate to send to your friends and a place to add a friend’s certificate.Otherwise, you have a few different screens. Other minor features seem slightly broken, like how I can’t open links directly into a browser from the RetroShare window. There’s something very wrong with the styling, in that almost all the input text is the same color as the box its typed into. It takes a bit to set itself up, and…you’re ready to go. I went for the most straightforward approach. There are some advanced options that I didn’t bother with (I assume they’re for people installing on multiple computers), and running I2P also apparently requires additional configuration. Some randomness by moving your mouse around the window.The type of node (Standard, over Tor, and over Tor and I2P,.Running the program, you’re asked to fill in… I wasn’t able to get the Ubuntu software repository to work, so downloaded the AppImage file. Note that, despite documentation stating that RetroShare is licensed under the GPLv2, the repository has a LICENSES folder including AGPLv3, AGPLv3 or later, Apache 2.0, GPLv3, LGPLv3, MIT, and CC-BY-SA 4.0, with no real indication of what license covers what or why GPLv2 isn’t represented at all. RetroShare bills itself as “secure communication for everyone,” a decentralized system designed to mimic most typical communication services (forum, chat, e-mail, and so forth) with anonymity outside of friend relationships. Note that I added a specific socialshowdown tag to easily collect these posts, if you want to easily find the others in the series. Each post is an overview of the system I have been and will be working with, along my general impressions.įeel free to contribute your own findings as I go, either on the same networks or pointers to and descriptions of any networks I may have missed. There’s more detail in this post, but this is one of a series of posts investigating the Free-as-in-Freedom social networks that are available, to see how they compare to the for-profit networks that exploit users.
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