White Noise

A secure, private, and decentralized chat app built on Nostr, using the MLS protocol under the hood.

Overview

White Noise aims to be the most secure private chat app on Nostr, with a focus on privacy and security. Under the hood, it uses the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol to manage group communications in a highly secure way. Nostr is used as the transport protocol and as the framework for the ongoing conversation in each chat.

The Spec

White Noise is an implemenetation of the NIP-104 spec. This is still a draft spec, so it may change before it is finalized.

Running White Noise

To build the app in release mode for desktop, run bun tauri build.

MacOS

• On MacOS, running bun tauri build will create both a .app bundle and a .dmg installer. Install the .dmg in the same way you would install any other MacOS application.
• To update the app, run git pull and bun tauri build again. The app very much alpha so expect that updates will break your groups and chats. If you end up in an unrecoverable state, you can try deleting the ~/Library/Application Support/chat.whitenoise.dev directory and running the app again. When you delete that directory, you're deleting all the MLS group state so you'll need to re-create or re-join the groups you had before and your previous history will be lost.

Linux

• I haven't tried the app on Linux yet. Let me know how it goes!

Windows

• I haven't tried the app on Windows yet. Let me know how it goes!

Android

• To build the app on Android, it's easiest to run bun tauri android build --apk --split-per-abi. This will generate a number of APKs, one for each architecture. You can then install the one that matches your phone.

iOS

• Right now, you can't build for iOS.

Contributing

White Noise is built with Tauri & SvelteKit. To get started contributing you'll need to have the Rust toolchain installed and the Bun JavaScript package manager.

1. First off, you'll need to install nostr-rs-relay and run it locally when developing. At the moment, to simplify development everything happens over a local relay on ws://localhost:8080.
2. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/erskingardner/whitenoise.git and cd whitenoise.
3. Run bun install to install the front-end dependencies.
4. Run bun tauri dev to start the app. If you want to see more comprehensive logging, run RUST_LOG=debug bun tauri dev.

License

White Noise is free and open source software, released under the Gnu AGPL v3 license. See the LICENSE file for details.