Keet is a peer-to-peer (p2p) chat app. This is my personal evaluation of that app, and the reason I choose not to use it.

The tech

Keet does almost all of it's operations without the need of a central server. This means that if the owning company Holepunch shuts down their servers, you should be able to keep chatting with your friends. Some things that might stop working if Holepunch no longer is operational are push notifications and registering new usernames. A little bit inconvenient, but not a big issue. Usernames are just for convenience, and not a necessity for the app to work.

The underlying p2p tech, pears, is open source under the Apache-2.0 license. So you can build your own p2p apps if you want to.

However, it looks like the source code of the chat app itself is not open source. So, unlike apps like Signal, Conversations or Element, we have to trust the developers that the app does what they say.

According to some online discussions, IP addresses are not secret with Keet. So it's supposedly not entirely anonymous.

The company

The company behind Keet, Holepunch, is funded by Bitfinex and Tether. Currently they don't make any money from Keet. They are planning to integrate bitcoin lightning into the app at some point.

The app

The app works nicely. You can send text and images. And reactions. I haven't tested the video capability yet. Onboarding is relatively quick. You have to take backup of a secret phrase in order to be able to recover your account if you lose your device.

The verdict

I won't switch to Keet. When Holepunch needs to start making money, the app will most likely change, and I don't think for the better.