gist/briar

Briar notes

Briar is a P2P over Tor messenger that can also peer over LAN and Bluetooth.

my-accounts.csv has list of my Briar addresses, as there isn’t support for multiple devices. They possibly should be in aminda.eu, but I don’t know what would be a good way to show them as browser integrated CSV viewers are rare and I don’t think these would be in so much demand.

Note that as per the FAQ, the connection request needs to be accepted within 48 hours by entering your Briar address. However after that introductions can be made without timeout concerns.

Briar doesn’t hold as big place in my heart as IRC or Matrix to have a dedicated page either and my HTML table tendency is effort even if the page wasn’t given a navigation menu entry.

Contents

• My account naming
  • Which accounts of mine you should care about?
• Briar desktop
• Further reading and quotes

My account naming

I tend to name my accounts Aminda-HOSTNAME (%Y-%j) e.g. Aminda-Lumina (2022-153) where %Y is year in 4 digits and %j the day of the year (001 to 366). However the older the Briar account still in use, the more random naming scheme there is.

This is by no means a security feature, anyone can name their device like that, it’s more of convenience should there be older and newer me on same device in contacts lists. This doesn’t either mean that I will remember this scheme or updating these files.

Which accounts of mine you should care about?

For more details such as the Briar links, refer to my-accounts.tsv.

• My Briar desktops serve my phones that only connect to network when charging, although the bundled tor taking 100 % of CPU has reduced their online time.
  • Aminda-Lumina (2022-153) has became more active and travels with me. ThinkPad T470 so focus on productivity.
  • Aminda (SedricFlatpak-2022-075) home device that also runs Samba for PlayStation 2 and in general is more gayming focused.
  • Aminda-Lavenza (2023-281) is my Steam Deck on SteamOS, preview channel and it might be unstable and get removed suddenly if the OS fails on me, but I seldom open Briar on it due to the effort. It’s just so much more pleasant to use with dock connected to TV with BT controller and neckspeaker and just for gaming and when I do need terminal, SSH exists. I am rambling now…
• My phones are
  • Aminda-Yeul 2024-W05-6 - my primary phone, Fairphone 5 so hopefully around for a long time. Replaced Aminda-Janus (2023-061) due to charging port accident, has had two factory resets.
  • Mikaela - my tertiary phone predating the naming scheme discussed earlier, but as it’s SailfishOS Android AppSupport important Briar features are not implemented and I don’t use it that much. Since the decommissioning of Axel (aka. “A”) also my oldest Briar account that can be seen around on forums.
  • Aminda-Janus (2023-061) - my previous main phone. 10 000 mAh battery is nice, but slow charging taking days to full charge isn’t, it will go away at some point.
• My family devices that are seldom online don’t need to be cared about that much, but they have all the forums that my other devices if I have been sharing them.
  • Aminda-Zaldaryn (2022-161) - mostly seen when I am at family.
  • Aminda-Rbtpzn (2023-034) - 2006 desktop PC that really shouldn’t have Briar.
• Then there are deprecated accounts/devices that occassionally come online but are not a priority.
  • Aminda-Lumina-UserTest-2023-045 is a Briar test build instance as a result of attempting to contribute and test Briar flatpak.
• And dead accounts.
  • Aminda-Janus (2022-311)
    • factory reset on 2023-061. Note changed date number.
  • A
    • factory reset on 2023-244. The name A will not be reused, if this phone ever returns to Briar, which is unlikely for lack of resources, it would be Aminda-Axel (%Y-%j)

And to repeat one more time:

%j The day of the year as a decimal number (range 001 to 366). (Calculated from tm_yday.)

– Manual page strftime(3)

Briar desktop

Port: it will pick one and try to stick with it, so sudo netstat -plnt is your friend, look for java. It should be on LAN and link-local interfaces.

I install it from Flathub and at the time of writing it seems to roughly have feature parity with the Android version meaning all private messages, forums, private groups, mailbox and forums are supported in that order.

Further reading and quotes

• https://briarproject.org/quick-start/

  • Please note that Briar will only synchronize messages with your contacts, not with nearby strangers who are running Briar. And it will only sync the messages you’ve chosen to share with each contact. For example, if you invite your contacts X and Y to join a forum, and they accept, then messages in that forum will be synced with X or Y whenever they’re within range. So you can receive forum messages from X in one location, travel to another location, and deliver those messages to Y.

  • But this doesn’t work for private messages: they’re only synchronized directly between the sender and recipient.

• https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ

  • Your Briar link contains a public key and it is safe to publish in the same way as a PGP public key. If you want to contact someone via Briar, both of you need to add each other’s links.

  • No, your online status isn’t exposed by publishing your briar:// link. Only your contacts can tell whether you’re online.

  • No. Unlike with adding contacts at a distance and its 48 hours timeout, there’s no such thing for introductions.

• https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar-desktop/-/wikis/Changelog

  • [0.2.0-beta 2022-02-22] Synchronize messages via local LAN

• #2081: Add to FAQ most frequent reasons why Briar fails to connect to a contact