Is it safe ? Does it do everything it says it do ? If so how is it popular yet ? Like does it have any catches or something ?https://f-droid.org/packages/org.briarproject.briar.android/
Until they rework Forums and Groups, it's going to be dead in the water from a usability perspective. Both Forums and Groups work with threads and not messages. And when messages are added as replies, the contents of the group chat bloat up in unpredictable ways, until it becomes more or less unusable.
I wish I could, but desktop application is limited in functionality and I don't know how to make the mobile app function properly (Waydroid doesn't allow bluetooth use). I don't have a mobile device I can make as private as my desktop, so I would not want to have my chats there.
I even used it while traveling with friends. We couldn't have our seats together in the airplane and the capability to chat and shitpost over bluetooth securely was kinda nice without annoying everyone.
I've used it for the exact same purpose, great minds think alike. It's perfect for that scenario given there's no internet.
I just don't use it much otherwise because apps like Signal are far easier to move my friends and family on to and they're more than good enough. The metadata privacy Tor would provide would give me a lot of peace of mind but I know it'll never happen.
I've been using it for comms with some friends and family when we're out of conventional network range. It works great, the pairing process is a bit of a barrier for securitu-muggles, but it works perfectly.
My only annoyance is that I can't run the mailbox program on a regular Linux/docker server.