Quiet! How Local-First Software Can Keep Remote Teams Safe and Unlock a New Wave of Software Freedom Activism

Presented at A New HOPE (2022), July 24, 2022, noon (50 minutes)

The pandemic pushed more groups than ever into using online collaboration tools, but for many these tools are not safe. This talk proposes a way to improve that situation, as well as a newish approach to building such tools that could be the basis for a new era of the free software movement.<br><br>First will be a demo of Quiet, a Tor-based, peer-to-peer team chat app that is familiar and usable, but doesn't require trusting a corporate cloud, bringing one's own server, or using a friend's server. In Quiet, team member devices connect directly to each other over Tor onion services and sync data using a CRDT. (And it works well!)<br><br>Second, Holmes will show how this "sync directly over Tor" approach is generalizable beyond chat apps and can be used to build secure, autonomous alternatives to a broad class of collaboration tools that currently depend on some sort of cloud, such as Google Docs, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Figma, 1Password, LastPass, and so on.<br><br>Finally, there will be a survey of the growing movement of thinkers and builders (sometimes calling themselves the "local-first software movement") who see a path to making this private and secure alternative approach to software even easier for small teams than building federated or cloud-dependent apps, and you will hear a rousing case for why developers and early adopters should join this awesome movement. (Spoiler: because by joining this movement you can advance the privacy and security of groups doing sensitive work right now, while at the same time laying the groundwork for a better way to make software in the future that would give all users more privacy, security, and control.)<br>

Presenters:

• Holmes Wilson
  **Holmes Wilson** is an Internet freedom activist whose work mixes mass mobilization and software tools. He is a co-founder and board member of Fight for the Future: the activism organization that was instrumental in defeating the infamous U.S. site-blocking laws SOPA/PIPA, fighting for net neutrality rules in the U.S. and Europe, opposing law enforcement crypto backdoors, and more recently challenging the use of face recognition tech by U.S. law enforcement and products like Amazon Ring. He also previously co-founded Miro, a free software video player based on Bittorrent and RSS, and was a campaign manager at the Free Software Foundation. He's currently building Quiet, a local-first, peer-to-peer team chat app.

Links:

• https://scheduler.hope.net/new-hope/talk/RXTMEX/
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/A New HOPE (2022)/A New HOPE (2022) Quiet - How Local-First Software Can Keep Remote Teams Safe and More.mp4
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/A New HOPE (2022)/A New HOPE (2022) Quiet How Local-First Software Can Keep Remote Teams Safe and More.srt (subtitles)

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