Retroshare - decentralized, p2p network to create forums, blogs, chat rooms and share files

http://retroshare.net/

Retroshare’s philosophy: decentralization and privacy

Retroshare is all about sharing and  communicating with trusted Friends. This is the core design of  Retroshare: a decentralised Friend-2-Friend network, which allows you to  share stuff … not with the whole world… but with people you know and  trust. 

Privacy

Retroshare creates direct SSL secured  connections with your friends. This ensures that you conversations are  private and cannot be eavesdropped on. The decentralised design ensures  that there is no central server or single company that has access to all  the data. Some people like to call Retroshare a  “DarkNet”. The similarities are a result of the Friend-2-Friend design  rather than a deliberate aim.  Actually, it is essential for Retroshare  to use strong identities to authenticate your friends. We don’t hide  Retroshare’s existence, but instead focus on keeping communication  private and and only sharing information with your friends. 

The decentralized way

The decentralized nature of the  Retroshare network requires information progressively flow through  friends as they connect to each others. This happens for instance to  Retroshare forums and channels, where subscribers propagate interesting  topics to their friends making them more popular per se. This encourages you to set things in  motion and let the network silently handle them: send messages to your  friends, start downloads, subscribe to channels – and let Retroshare  worry about it in the background. It will update your friends when they  come online, and let you know when new content arrives. You can even  read your new messages offline, as most content is locally cached for  you to access when you want to. 

Localized network

Retroshare tells you about the people  around you: your friends and–optionally–friends of your friends, but  very little about what lies beyond.  You can receive information like  forum posts and files from the rest of the network, but you have no idea  about the original source of the information.  Retroshare’s design  ensures you have little idea of who is out there – it is just friends,  of friends, of friends, of friends ad infinitum. As the developers of the software we have  no idea who is using Retroshare and for what purposes, beyond our own  friends, and thats the way we like it. 

Anonymity and Censorship Resistance beyond your own friends

Retroshare’s security comes from using a  set of communication algorithms that provide anonymity beyond your own  friends: file transfer is ruled by a Friend-2-Friend routing algorithm,  decentralized chat is made possible by an anonymous message routing  method. The benefits of such algorithms are best described by the author’s of Turtle [1], one of the algorithms Retroshare uses: 

When designing Turtle, we were inspired  by the way people living under oppressive regimes share information  deemed “hostile” by their government (this can be books, newsletters,  video and audio recordings, or even political jokes). Because of the  potentially very serious consequences raising from being  caught possessing/distributing such material, no single individual is  willing to share it, except with close friends. Experience has repeatedly shown that,  even in the most repressive environments, this “friends-to-friends”  delivery network is remarkably effective in disseminating information,  with relatively little risks for the participating parties; if one  chooses his friends carefully, the chance of being caught doing the  forbidden exchanges becomes very small. 

Retroshare’s decentralised model means there is no central authority to remove content.
As described by Wikipedia [2] , Retroshare “… makes it difficult to  intrude and hardly possible to monitor from an external point of  view.” This makes government monitoring and prosecution impossible  beyond the will of Retroshare users.